


The Best-Looking Boys

by sevenfists



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Growing Up, Horny Teenagers, Idiots in Love, Language Barrier, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-09 12:26:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11104548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfists/pseuds/sevenfists
Summary: He was just a kid, just like Sidney, and far away from home. When Sidney didn’t look away, Evgeni mimed swinging a baseball bat, and Gonch was right; it was clear he had no idea what he was doing.That was the first time Sidney thought they could maybe be friends.





	The Best-Looking Boys

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saintroux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintroux/gifts).



> For saintroux, for the 2017 Sid/Geno Exchange. I tried to include a number of the things you said you like—I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Takes place during Geno’s rookie year (2006-2007), with some minor changes to the timeline for plot purposes.
> 
> Profound thanks to werebear for exceptional story midwifery, and to MC and K for emergency consultation on French surnames.

Malkin was tall, and kind of funny-looking, and didn’t seem to speak any English whatsoever.

He looked pretty freaked out, Sidney thought: hanging back behind his interpreter, his face fixed in a pained smile that was honestly more of a grimace. Sidney could sympathize. Meeting Mario was intimidating as hell, and Sidney still hadn’t totally gotten over the house, even though it was _his_ house now, too—his home.

“It’s really good to meet you,” he said, when it was his turn to shake Malkin’s hand. 

“Hello,” Malkin said, and then smiled at him, wide and unexpected. “Sidney Crosby.” He had a deep voice, and a thick accent. He turned and rattled something off to his interpreter, who laughed loudly and shook his head, and didn’t translate. 

Sidney didn’t understand what was funny. All he’d done was say hello. 

It was just a little rude, that was all. As first impressions went, it could have been better.

  


* * *

  


He knew, of course, that the Penguins had drafted Malkin, that everyone was waiting for him—that he was really good. Months ago, when all of the talk about Malkin’s arrival was still only scuttlebutt, Sidney had bugged the video coach for some of Malkin’s Metallurg footage, and watched all of it multiple times. Malkin needed to work on his faceoffs, and he wasn’t great along the boards, but give him the puck and the room to make a play and he would make everyone else on the ice look like a child.

But nobody knew for sure when or if Malkin was coming. Sidney had been pretty surprised when reports started surfacing in August that Malkin had defected from the Superleague. Pat had called him once Malkin was in Los Angeles and given him the run-down, and it sounded really dramatic, to the extent that Sidney kind of suspected Pat was exaggerating. But if it was true, or even mostly true, then Malkin was—brave, and determined, and Sidney had been really excited to meet him.

Well, it was okay if Malkin was kind of a jerk. Sidney could still play hockey with people who didn’t like him.

After that night at Mario’s, he didn’t talk to Malkin again until fitness testing, a week and a half later. But he went to the rookie camp a couple of times to watch Malkin and Staal, and Letang. Malkin was a good skater, quick to accelerate. Sidney remembered seeing him play at Worlds back in May and thinking: _That guy is supposed to be a Penguin._ And now he was: Sidney’s teammate. 

Probably Malkin hadn’t been laughing _at_ him.

During fitness testing, he made it a point to say hello to Malkin while they were waiting to take their turns on the bikes. Malkin and Gonch were standing together, Gonch pointing at things and speaking rapidly and Malkin listening, expression intent, nodding from time to time. Sidney went over to them and then realized, when they both turned polite, questioning faces toward him, that he didn’t actually have anything to say.

“Uh, how’s it going?” he tried.

Gonch, because he was a grown-up and a really nice guy, smiled at Sidney and said, “I’m telling Zhenya about what happens today. It’s easier for him to know exactly what will happen.”

Sidney nodded. He remembered what it was like to move to a strange place without speaking the language. “Does he have, uh.” He looked at Malkin, because he had always hated it in Rimouski when people talked _about_ him instead of _to_ him, even at the beginning when he didn’t really speak any French. “Is there anything I can help you with? Like, I don’t know, maybe meeting some of the guys?”

It was a dumb question, probably. Gonch had everything under control. But when Gonch translated, Malkin smiled at Sidney, that same big smile from dinner at Mario’s, and said, in careful English, “Yes. Thank you.”

“Yes, please take him off my hands for a few minutes,” Gonch said, and added something to Malkin in Russian that made Malkin roll his eyes.

Sidney led Malkin around and introduced him to the team, which was really kind of stupid: “This is Evgeni,” he said, over and over, and Malkin shook hands with everyone and smiled and looked enormously uncomfortable in response to anything that was said to him. He probably didn’t understand a word.

“What a handsome motherfucker,” Max said. “Look at that nose. My God. How do I say this—Evgeni? Y—Yev—”

“Evgeni,” Malkin said firmly, grinning. It was the first time he hadn’t looked like he wanted to sink down through the ground and disappear.

“Fuck it, I can’t pronounce that,” Max said. “We need to think of a nickname for you, big boy.”

“Talbo,” Sidney said, a little desperately, hoping to head this off at the pass.

“No, shh, I’ll think of something,” Max said. “Give the master time to work.” 

Max got called away to do pull-ups, and Sidney looked up at Malkin, his big nose and his sleepy brown eyes, and said, quietly, “Evgeni?” He thought he had the pronunciation right—or almost right.

“Yes,” Malkin said, and smiled.

  


* * *

  


So Malkin—Evgeni—maybe wasn’t so bad. And after the first day of training camp, Sidney was all in. The guy was a monster. He and Bugsy worked well together during the scrimmage, and Malkin was all smiles the whole time, nodding and laughing no matter what was said to him, working hard, Sidney thought, to fit in and be part of the team. On the ice, it didn’t matter that he didn’t speak English.

After practice on the second day, Colby and Moore started tossing pucks over the glass to the gathered fans. “Sid, Sidney, Sid,” Colby kept calling, until Sidney gave in, laughing, and skated over there to check out what they were doing.

“This guy says I can’t hit the puck over the glass,” Colby said.

Sidney scrunched up his face. “With your stick?”

“Okay, doubting Thomas,” Colby said, pointing menacingly at Sidney. “You watch this. Hit me with it, Dom.”

Colby struck out: three swings in a row without connecting. Sidney laughed until his sides hurt.

“You try it, then, wiseass,” Colby said, and wouldn’t let up until Sidney finally gave in and squared off, his stick raised for the puck.

“Ready?” Moore asked, and tossed it to him underhand.

Sidney tracked the puck, swung, and knocked it way into the stands, fifteen rows deep at least.

“Outrageous!” Colby bellowed.

After the ensuing shouting and scuffling died down, Sidney happened to glance over at the bench and saw Gonch and Evgeni standing there, watching them. Evgeni was grinning widely. Their eyes met, and Evgeni gave Sidney a thumbs-up.

“Oh, good idea,” Colby said, following Sidney’s gaze. “See if he wants to give it a shot.”

“Colby, come on,” Sidney said. “He doesn’t want to.” He felt weird—embarrassed to be caught goofing around, even though Evgeni and Gonch both looked amused.

“How do you know?” Colby said. “You won’t know unless you ask him.”

“I’ll pitch him a soft one,” Moore said.

“Okay, sure,” Sidney said, because he’d learned that the easiest way to get people to like him was to laugh at everything they said, even if it was kind of mean, and to be a good sport. He went along with a lot of stuff that he didn’t necessarily totally want to do.

He skated over to the bench and leaned against the boards. Evgeni was still smiling, but he looked a little puzzled now, his eyebrows raised.

“Colby wants you to come play baseball,” Sidney said.

Evgeni’s gaze lingered on Sidney even as Gonch translated. Sidney felt his face heating up as Evgeni cocked his head before responding, his smile shifting into a smirk.

“He says he doesn’t want to make you look bad,” Gonch said. He smiled at Sidney and added, “I don’t think he has ever played baseball. He’s only teasing you.”

“Oh,” Sidney said. He looked at Evgeni, his hair matted down from his helmet, his expression probably hopeful and not mocking. He was just a kid, just like Sidney, and far away from home. When Sidney didn’t look away, Evgeni mimed swinging a baseball bat, and Gonch was right; it was clear he had no idea what he was doing. 

That was the first time Sidney thought they could maybe be friends.

  


* * *

  


Evgeni dislocated his shoulder less than a week later, in his first preseason game, and then he was out for a while. Sidney sort of—not _forgot_ about him, but there was so much going on, with all the traveling around for exhibition games, and then the team-building stuff at West Point, and then more exhibition games. Sidney was busy, and Evgeni was rehabbing his shoulder and not around very much, and it was easy to let other things take a front seat in his head.

But Sidney was going to be captain soon, not this year but probably the next, and part of that was remembering to think about his teammates, and making sure they were okay. He knew Evgeni was living with Gonch, who was a cool guy, but kind of old; and he knew from Mario that Evgeni didn’t have a car yet, and needed Gonch to drive him around everywhere. And Gonch had a wife and a kid, and Sidney could see him being less than super psyched about serving as Evgeni’s live-in chauffeur. 

They had a few days off between the end of the preseason and the start of the regular season, and Sidney called Gonch and said, “Do you think Evgeni would like to go to the mall with me?” But he was trying to be more assertive, so then he said, “I’m going this afternoon, and he’s welcome to come.” The mall seemed like a safe activity that wouldn’t require too much talking.

“Yes,” Gonch said. “Let me ask him. But I think he’ll want to.” He paused. “Do you need me there to translate?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sidney said. “I mean, unless he won’t be comfortable. But I’m fine with, you know, pointing and gesturing.”

Gonch laughed. “I’ll tell him. He can get frustrated, if he wants to say something and can’t. But I’ll tell him to—oh, please wait for a minute. Hey, Zhenya!” There was a stream of muffled Russian. Sidney waited. He heard Evgeni’s low voice in the background, and Gonch saying something else. Then Gonch said, “Okay, Sid, he says he’ll go with you.”

“Great,” Sidney said. “I’ll pick him up at 2:00? Is that okay? Oh, and please tell him that I don’t have anything specific in mind, so we can go anywhere he wants to. And we can leave whenever he’s ready.”

“I’ll tell him,” Gonch said, sounding amused.

When Sidney pulled up at Gonch’s house that afternoon, Evgeni was outside on the front steps. Early October in Pittsburgh was still pretty warm, and Evgeni was sitting in the sun and doing what Sidney could only categorize as basking. 

He rolled down the window and waved, and Evgeni stood up and came trotting down the driveway and climbed in the passenger seat. “Hi, Sid,” Evgeni said, beaming.

“Hi,” Sidney said, smiling in helpless response to the clear delight on Evgeni’s face. “We’re going to the mall. Are you ready to go?”

Evgeni buckled his seatbelt and said something in Russian, and then he pointed through the windshield.

“Okay, I guess that’s a yes,” Sidney said.

Sidney talked the whole way there, pointing out stuff along the way without really expecting Evgeni to understand or respond. “If we kept going straight there, that’s how I go to the Igloo,” he said, and, “Oh, that place has really good milkshakes.” He was surprised when Evgeni pointed to a McDonald’s and said, “I like.”

“Oh yeah?” Sidney said. “You like burgers, huh?”

“Burger,” Evgeni agreed.

They understood each other just fine.

Once they were actually in the mall, though, Evgeni shrank down and trailed Sidney so closely that he stepped on Sidney’s heels a couple of times. “It’s okay,” Sidney said, even though he wasn’t thrilled about the mall, either. The middle of the afternoon on a weekday was about as safe as it got, but people would still stare, and maybe ask him to sign things. He was used to it, kind of, but used to it didn’t mean he liked it. 

But Evgeni looked shell-shocked, like maybe this was just plain and simple too much for him, the skylights overhead and the glossy storefronts, the elderly mall walkers in their athletic shoes. Sidney knew this wasn’t Evgeni’s first time in the States, and surely he wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept of a shopping mall. Surely they had malls in Russia. Sidney wasn’t totally certain what the issue was. Maybe it was the homesickness and unfamiliarity catching up to Evgeni all at once.

“It’s okay,” he said again, and cautiously patted Evgeni’s arm. “We can leave. Go home?” He pointed toward the entrance.

Evgeni hesitated, and then shook his head.

“Okay,” Sidney said. If that was what Evgeni wanted, it was his funeral.

But Evgeni relaxed as they wandered around the mall. Sidney stopped outside every store at first and pointed and raised his eyebrows, and Evgeni got the idea pretty quickly. It wasn’t long before Sidney realized he had lost control of the expedition. 

He had thought that Evgeni might want to buy some clothes, but instead Evgeni wanted to go in all of the random specialty shops that Sidney never bothered with, the places that sold candles and luggage. “I like,” Evgeni pronounced, after taking a deep whiff of a bright pink candle in a jar, and grinned at Sidney. He held out the candle. “Ksenia.”

“Oh, for Gonch’s wife?” Sidney asked. “You want to buy Ksenia a gift.” He spoke slowly, and pointed at the candle. “A gift for Ksenia.”

“Gift,” Evgeni said, and proudly handed over his card at the register.

Sidney felt good about all of it: proud of himself for having the idea, glad that Evgeni had agreed, pleased that it seemed to go well. He even managed to pick out a birthday present for his mother. When he dropped Evgeni off later that afternoon, Evgeni gave him a big smile and said, “Thank you, Sid.”

“Well—you’re welcome,” Sidney said, instead of protesting how it hadn’t been any trouble, really, he was happy to. Evgeni wouldn’t understand any of that anyway.

  


* * *

  


Someone in the front office had dubbed Evgeni ‘Geno,’ which Sidney didn’t really understand and thought was kind of stupid, but whatever. Evgeni seemed to like it, and started introducing himself to people that way, and Sidney could see which way the wind was blowing.

“Which do you like?” he asked Evgeni after practice one day, about a week after their shopping trip. Evgeni was back on the ice with the team, but still in a no-contact jersey. “Evgeni, or Geno? Or—Zhenya?” Gonch had explained the nickname to him when he asked, and even patiently written it out so that Sidney could see how it was spelled. 

Evgeni looked up at him, still wearing his chest protector, his hair a sweaty tangle. “Geno, okay,” he said. “Hockey.”

“A hockey nickname,” Sidney said. “Geno. Do you want me to call you that?”

Evgeni glanced over at Gonch, sitting beside him, and asked him something. Gonch nodded, and then laughed and shoved gently at Evgeni’s shoulder. Sidney shifted his weight, feeling awkward. He hadn’t meant this to be a big thing, he just—wanted to know.

“Geno, hockey,” Evgeni said. “Penguins hockey.”

Okay, then: Geno.

  


* * *

  


Geno was tall, and he had bad teeth and a deep laugh, and he liked getting his way. His personality started to emerge as the initial shock of a new team and new country wore off. He didn’t say much, and he stuck close to Gonch at all times, but he watched everything that went on in the locker room, and from time to time he would get Gonch to translate a sly remark that was usually quite funny. Max pranked him by filling his skates with Silly String, and Geno somehow recruited Flower to help him retaliate by putting clear tape on the blades of Max’s skates before practice, so that when he went out on the ice, he just slid. Sidney missed all of the lead-up, but he was there for the aftermath: Geno bent over and laughing hard, and accepting congratulatory backslaps from the rest of the team, always delighted to witness a good prank.

After his shoulder healed, he scored a goal in six games in a row, and Sidney was happy to let a guy like that go out last, to have someone like that on his team.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Geno had big, volatile emotions, and he got worked up during games, sometimes, cursing loudly in Russian on the bench. He took the team’s failures hard and his own failures harder. He didn’t like being teased. Bugsy tried to get him to talk to a reporter one afternoon after practice, hassling him about it pretty hard until Geno lost his temper and said something harsh and angry in Russian and stomped off toward the change room.

“Christ, I was just kidding,” Bugsy said.

“He doesn’t think you’re fucking funny,” Rex said. “Leave the kid alone. He’s been in the country for two months. He isn’t going to talk to any reporters.”

“Okay, I fucking hear you,” Bugsy said, but nobody tried to make Geno talk to the press after that.

Mostly, though, Sidney got the impression that Geno was on his best behavior, like he was afraid the team would send him back to Russia if he screwed up too much, which was ridiculous. He wasn’t screwing up. He was fast, and he had good hands. He belonged in the NHL. He was a Penguin now.

Sidney wondered what he was thinking, sometimes, watching Geno frown at nothing in the dressing room, or smile fixedly as one of the guys talked to him, a sort of blank glazed look of determined uncomprehending friendliness. He wanted to know what Geno thought of Pittsburgh, and the team. He wanted to know if Geno was happy. But Geno probably wouldn’t understand him if he asked, and he certainly wasn’t going to ask Gonch to translate. It probably wasn’t any of his business anyway.

They went on a road trip at the end of the month, to Philadelphia and then out to California for the better part of a week. Some of the guys complained about the longer road trips, but Sidney didn’t mind them. He liked all of the hanging out and the team meals. The year before, Flower and Max had both turned twenty-one partway through the season, and then Sidney was on his own in the hotel when the team went out to drink. But this year, he had Geno and Jordy, and it was way better.

The night after they beat the Kings, everyone went out to a bar, and Sidney went down the hall and knocked on Geno’s door. He had learned the hard way that Geno and talking on the phone didn’t mix. Geno was slow to answer, and he looked grouchy when he opened the door, but he lit up with a smile when he saw Sidney.

“Hey,” Sidney said. “Jordy and I are going to watch a movie. Do you want to watch with us? A movie.” He knew Geno understood ‘movie’; it had come up in conversation on the bus the day before. The rest of it was a crapshoot, but hopefully he would be able to figure it out from context.

Geno’s eyebrows drew together. He had an expressive face, and Sidney was starting to be able to read him, to some extent. The eyebrows meant he was trying to mentally translate what Sidney had said, and needed a second to work through it. “Okay, movie,” he said at last.

“Come on, we’re in my room,” Sidney said. “Colby went out.”

Geno stared at him, uncomprehending.

“My room,” Sidney said again, and pointed down the hall. “Come on.”

“Okay,” Geno said. He went back into his room for a moment, and came out wearing a pair of athletic slides, pulling a sweatshirt over his head. He was cold a lot, Sidney had noticed, always bundled up under a blanket on the plane. 

Back in Sidney’s room, Jordy had claimed Colby’s bed and settled in. He flashed Sidney a big shit-eating grin.

“Jordy, come on,” Sidney said.

“I’m the biggest,” Jordy said. “You little guys can share the other bed.”

Okay, whatever; he and Geno had to sit _somewhere_ , and it wasn’t worth arguing about. Sidney crawled onto the bed and patted the mattress beside him. “Come on, Geno.”

But Geno hesitated. His eyes darted over to the armchair in the corner, and Sidney frowned. There wasn’t anything weird about sitting on the bed together, but Geno was making it weird. “Come on,” he said again. “You can’t see the TV so well from over there.”

“Hurry it up, guys,” Jordy said.

Geno glanced between Jordy and Sidney, frowning, and then lifted one shoulder in a shrug and joined Sidney on the bed.

Jordy, having claimed the remote in addition to the bed, picked the movie: the latest _Mission: Impossible_ , which was probably a good choice for Geno, as the plot was secondary to all of the running around shooting at things. And Geno seemed to be enjoying it, every time Sidney glanced over: staring raptly at the screen as he chewed on his lower lip.

Jordy fell asleep forty-five minutes in. Sidney nudged Geno with his elbow and tipped his head in Jordy’s direction, and Geno looked over and grinned.

“He, uh,” he said quietly, and mimicked a snore.

“He snores,” Sidney said. “Yeah. Do you want to finish the movie? We can stop.”

Geno said something in Russian. Sidney pointed at the television and shrugged dramatically, eyebrows up. Geno nodded, and settled in deeper against the pillows.

“Okay,” Sidney said. “We’ll watch.”

He fell asleep, too. The bed was really comfortable, and he was tired a lot, the same way he was hungry all the time. Mario and Nathalie kept telling him he would grow out of it, but it hadn’t happened yet. He woke up when the credits were rolling. Geno was still beside him, stretched out with his arms folded behind his head. Their eyes met, and Sidney felt his face go hot, for some reason. There was just something about the way Geno was looking at him.

“You sleep,” Geno whispered.

Sidney didn’t know if he meant it as a question or a command. “I guess it’s the time difference,” he said, but Geno wouldn’t understand that. “Jet lag. Uh—”

“Jet lag,” Geno said, nodding. Of course he knew that term; everyone had been bitching about it for the last three days. Geno sat up and said, “I go.” He reached out and put one big hand on the top of Sidney’s head. “Thank you.”

“See you tomorrow,” Sidney whispered. 

After Geno left, Sidney turned off the television and fell asleep again to the steady sound of Jordy’s snores.

  


* * *

  


The night before they played the Ducks, the whole team went out for dinner, and Sidney found himself seated at a table with Colby, like usual, and Max and Bugsy, and also with Geno and Gonch. Geno sat two down from Sidney on the opposite side and smiled at him a lot, way more than Sidney could account for.

“So, Geno,” Max said, as they waited for their food. “I want to know about a few of your favorite things.”

Gonch translated this for Geno, who shook his head, frowning. “In English,” Gonch was saying. Sidney recognized the phrase after hearing it more and more frequently over the past few weeks, as Gonch tried to get Geno to do more than sit quietly and laugh. Geno’s English was already much better than it had been when he arrived, but he was shy about using it at all, and even more shy about using it in groups.

Gonch seemed to win the argument, or at least Geno huffed and folded his arms and leaned back in his seat, and Gonch said to Max, “Okay, ask him.”

Max grinned. “Okay. Geno, favorite food?”

“Favorite,” Geno said, glancing at Gonch for confirmation, and then added something in Russian.

“No, favorite _American_ food,” Max said.

“Leave him alone, Talbo,” Colby said. “He doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He’s got to learn English, doesn’t he?” Max said. “What the fuck do you know about it? I had to learn English, didn’t I? He can handle it. And Gonch agrees with me.”

Sidney looked at Gonch, who was nodding. “He needs to try. Maybe it’s not so good for him to live with me and speak Russian all the time, but.” He shrugged.

“Favorite food, Geno,” Max said.

“Burger,” Geno said.

“No surprise there,” Bugsy said, grinning.

“Favorite animal,” Max said.

Geno glanced at Gonch. “Animal,” Gonch said, and repeated it in Russian.

It went on in that vein for a while. Colby and Bugsy got in on it, too. Geno didn’t understand everything, and sometimes needed Gonch to translate his responses. But he did pretty well. 

“Favorite teammate,” Max said after a while. “It’s me, right?” Everyone laughed. It was obviously Gonch.

But Geno shrugged and said, “Sid.”

“What!” Gonch said. “I house you, feed you, and this is the thanks I get?” He went off into Russian, cheerfully berating Geno at great length, and Geno was grinning and his ears were pink and he wasn’t backing down. He kept shooting quick glances at Sidney as everyone else at the table laughed and carried on. He had an expression on his face like maybe he thought he was crossing a line and had decided not to care, and Sidney felt so flustered that he probably would have gone to hide in the washroom if he thought he could do it without being totally obvious.

“Aww, Sid’s _blushing_!” Colby said, and Sidney had basically never wanted to die as much as he did in that moment.

Later, back at the hotel, Colby turned on the television and said, “You and Geno are getting to be pretty good friends, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Sidney said. He thought they were probably friends. They were friends, so it wasn’t weird. Colby didn’t think it was weird, so it was probably okay. There was no need for him to think about the look on Geno’s face when he told everyone that Sidney was his favorite.

  


* * *

  


They were in Ottawa the next week to play the Senators. With a few days off before their next game, a lot of the guys wanted to go out drinking afterward, even though they lost. Poor Jordy was the only one too young to drink in Ontario, and Sidney felt a little guilty about abandoning him, but not guilty enough to stay at the hotel while the rest of the team went out.

And he wouldn’t be totally alone. Some of the older guys, the ones with families, wanted to stay in to call their wives. Gonch was one of them, and Sidney assumed that meant Geno wouldn’t go out, either, but there Geno was in the lobby, waiting around while Roots and Brooksie argued about where to go.

Geno shuffled over when he spotted Sidney, smiling, his hands loose in his pockets. His jeans were more hole than denim. His shirt had a very low neckline. “Hi, Sid.”

“Hi,” Sidney said, surprised. Geno was making progress, but it was still almost unheard of for him to do anything without Gonch. “Are you going out with us? You’re coming to the bar?”

“Bar,” Geno said, nodding. “I go. But…” He hunched his shoulders and grimaced.

“Stay with me,” Sidney said. “You don’t have to talk to anyone. We’ll have fun. When you want to leave, we can share a cab. You and me. Get a cab.” He pointed at Geno, and then at himself.

“Cab?” Geno said.

“Uh, taxi,” Sidney said, and Geno brightened.

“Okay, Sid,” Geno said. He had that look on his face again, the one that made Sidney want to glance over his shoulder to see who was watching Geno look at him like that.

The club they ended up in was dark and loud. The team took over a bunch of banquettes in the back, out of sight of the dance floor. Geno slid into the booth after Sidney and blocked him in, and then Sidney was trapped there between Geno and Max, and Max was grinning in a way that meant Sidney was definitely going to be hungover tomorrow.

There was a lot of booze. Sidney did a few shots, and then took a breather to drink some water and assess how drunk he felt. Somewhat, he decided. Max was telling a story and Geno was laughing, even though Max was talking pretty fast and kept slipping into French. Geno was large and warm and sitting way too close. Sidney was hyperaware of how close their thighs were, almost touching, but shifting away would only draw attention to it. He was stuck, overheated and nervous, and it got worse when Geno stretched his arm along the back of the bench behind Sidney’s shoulders. His fingertips brushed against Sidney’s upper arm. Sidney didn’t know what was happening and he was certain his face was bright red.

“I’m going to dance,” Max announced after a while, and started shoving at Colby on his other side. “Come on, Geno, let’s go dancing.”

Geno slanted an uncertain look at Sidney.

“You know, dancing,” Sidney said, and shimmied his shoulders, feeling like an idiot. 

“You come?” Geno asked.

Sidney shook his head. He didn’t dance. It was always too crowded, and being packed in among that many people made him anxious. It reminded him too much of getting mobbed by fans who wanted him to sign stuff for them.

“I stay,” Geno said.

“We’ll find you a girl,” Colby said. “We’ll find you _both_ girls.”

Nothing in life was less appealing to Sidney than hooking up with a random girl at a club. “No thanks,” he said. “I promised Gonch I would keep an eye on Geno.”

“Boring,” Max said, and he and Colby went off toward the strobing lights on the dance floor.

Then they were alone.

Sidney wasn’t sure what to do. Geno was looking at him from the corner of his eye, chewing on his lower lip like he wasn’t sure what came next, either. They could communicate okay, for the most part, but there was a difference between talking about practical, concrete things and having to make actual conversation.

There were still a bunch of shots on the tray. Sidney pulled it toward him and offered one of the shot glasses to Geno. “Do you want another?”

“Okay,” Geno said, and tipped it back smoothly. Sidney did one as well, and then they were sitting there again, staring at each other.

This was ridiculous.

“How you say?” Geno said abruptly, touching the shot glass. 

“What?” Sidney said. “That’s a shot glass.”

“Vodka,” Geno said. He touched the tray. “This?”

“Tray,” Sidney said, and they went through everything in sight in the club and all of their clothing, and then Geno produced a notepad and pen from somewhere on his person and started _drawing_ things. He was really terrible at it—Sidney couldn’t figure out what half the stuff even _was_ —and they laughed a lot, and did a few more shots, and Sidney leaned against Geno’s side to be able to see the paper. He was very warm.

By the time Colby and Max returned from the dance floor, they had abandoned the notepad and Sidney was telling a story about fishing with his uncles. Geno’s arm had found its way to the back of the bench again. He was smiling at Sidney and nodding from time to time. There was no way he had any clue what Sidney was saying, but he looked like he would be happy to stay there for the rest of the night, listening to Sidney’s dumb stories and sitting still a little bit too close.

“Hey, boys,” Colby said, plopping down across from them and scooting in to make room for Max. “Having fun?”

Geno took his arm away, and shifted away from Sidney on the bench.

Max was giving them a narrow look that Sidney couldn’t interpret. “More fun than we had, I think.”

“He’s mad because he got shot down,” Colby told Sidney.

“I didn’t get _shot down_ , she totally would have left with me if she didn’t have a boyfriend,” Max said.

Geno shifted again, and when Sidney glanced at him, he was frowning.

“You had enough of this, man?” Colby asked. “Scuds said he was thinking about leaving. You could catch a cab with him.”

“Okay,” Sidney said.

Geno stood a little bit too close to him, waiting outside for the cab, and even leaned against Sidney for just a moment, his chest against Sidney’s back. He was drunk, probably, and starting to get tired. It didn’t mean anything. Sidney didn’t think anything of it.

  


* * *

  


“So,” Max said, a few days later.

Sidney looked up from lacing his skates. “Yeah?”

Max sat down beside him. “You and Geno.”

The locker room was noisy as everyone dressed for practice, and Max had spoken so quietly that Sidney almost couldn’t hear him. “Okay?”

Max pursed his lips. He looked like he was choosing his words carefully, which was pretty unusual for Max. 

“ _What_ , Max,” Sidney said. He didn’t have all day.

“I think Geno has a crush on you,” Max said.

Sidney laughed, because that was ridiculous, Max was just pulling his leg—

Max was grinning, but he looked like he meant it.

“Max, come on,” Sidney said. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?” Max said. “He’s looking at you right now.”

Sidney glanced over reflexively and met Geno’s eyes, and Geno smiled at him, maybe a little nervous.

“See,” Max said.

“No way,” Sidney said. Was that what it meant, when Geno looked at him that way? It didn’t seem possible, but—

He snuck another glance. Geno was still watching him. His ears were pink. And Sidney just—didn’t understand, couldn’t fathom—and if Max knew, who else knew? Did everyone know? 

“Pretty funny, huh,” Max said, and Sidney tore his gaze away from Geno. Max was a dick, but he had always been nice to Sidney when it counted, and a couple of times last season had even stepped in when the teasing went too far. He probably wouldn’t say something like this as a joke.

It wouldn’t be the worst thing, for Geno, if he liked guys, and if the team knew he liked guys. People tried to be open-minded. But it was still one of those things you didn’t really talk about, even if everyone knew, and Sidney couldn’t help hoping that Max was mistaken, because Geno already had enough on his plate.

“We’re friends,” Sidney said.

“Sure,” Max said. “And he also wants you to stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

“You’re disgusting,” Sidney said.

Max laughed. “Come on, bud. It’s funny. You’ve got to admit it’s a little funny.”

“I don’t think it’s funny,” Sidney said. He was calm. This was no big deal. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll handle it.”

“Whoa, I don’t think you need to _handle_ it,” Max said, holding his hands out in front of his chest, the universal slow-down gesture. “It’s just funny, okay? You don’t need to worry about it.”

“So why did you tell me?” Sidney asked.

“I thought you would get a kick out of it,” Max said.

“It isn’t funny,” Sidney said. “If he—not that I think you’re right. But if he feels like that, we shouldn’t laugh about it.”

Max’s eyebrows went up. “Uh, okay. You’re right, I guess. I won’t say anything about it.”

“Sure,” Sidney said. “Thanks.”

“Okay, bud,” Max said, and clapped his shoulder, and went back to his own stall.

Geno was saying something to Gonch, gesturing animatedly. It was impossible. But Max had seemed so certain—but Max wasn’t really the first person who came to mind for meaningful insight into human nature. There was no way he was right. Geno was just friendly, that was all. Maybe things were a little different in Russia. Sidney decided he wasn’t going to waste any time thinking about it.

  


* * *

  


But of course he couldn’t get the thought out of his head. Max had planted the idea in his brain, and it took root there and sprouted. And the more he thought about it, the more he thought that maybe Max was right.

Geno watched him all the time: at practice, in the locker room, even in the change room, sometimes, his eyes darting away when Sidney dropped his towel. The weight of his attention was oppressive. It made Sidney feel hot and itchy and—

The trouble was, he sort of liked it.

Anyone would feel the same way. It was flattering to know that someone had a crush on you. 

Sidney had done stuff with girls. Some stuff. And he had really liked it, and never thought much beyond that. Most guys liked girls, so once he could check that box, he assumed he had it all figured out. He lost his virginity during his rookie year, very satisfactorily, and then gave himself permission to just focus on his career for a while. Dating was too complicated, and hooking up didn’t really appeal to him, and as long as he wasn’t a virgin, the team wouldn’t chirp him about it too much. He had never thought about guys. About doing anything with guys.

The trouble was, he started trying to get Geno to look at him _more_.

It was so stupid. He invented excuses to walk near Geno’s stall in the locker room: a new roll of tape, a question for LeClair. He very carefully didn’t look at Geno, but he could feel Geno watching him, and it gave him a rush to think that Geno wanted to look at him, that Geno was maybe having some of the same thoughts Sidney had started to have every night before bed. He lingered on the ice after practice and hoped that maybe Geno would stay late, too—but Geno never did; he was still carpooling with Gonch, and had to leave when Gonch did. 

Sidney felt so stupid and obvious, but he didn’t want to stop. He liked having these shivery, secret feelings.

They won at home against the Flyers, a two-point game for Sidney, and when he got in bed that night he was still too wound up to sleep. Well, there was an easy solution for that. He slid his hand into his boxers and gripped his soft dick, feeling it start to fatten up just from the promise of jerking off.

He didn’t usually think about anything in particular when he got himself off. Just the touch of his hand was enough for him, his palm slick with lotion. But tonight he thought about—well. About Geno.

Geno had spent a long time wandering around shirtless in the locker room after the game, laughing with Gonch about something and then smiling uncertainly when Rex congratulated him on his goal. Geno was tall, and he had—nice shoulders. His lips were always chapped, but they were full and pink, and Sidney thought about what it would be like to kiss him, to press his mouth against Geno’s and maybe put his arms around Geno’s waist. Maybe Geno would turn pink, maybe Geno would smile like it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And maybe—after they kissed for a while—maybe Sidney could put his hand in Geno’s pants and—and touch him—

Sidney groaned, long and low, and spilled into his fist.

He wasn’t sure how to feel about it, afterward, so mostly he just didn’t think about it, and that worked out pretty well for him. But he didn’t stop thinking about Geno.

Early November turned into late November. The team was doing really well, so well that Sidney didn’t want to think about it too much for fear of jinxing it. He was on pace for another hundred-point year, and Geno was playing really great, too, and it was everything he had dreamed of all through the long slog of last season, when it became clear pretty early on that they didn’t have a shot at making the playoffs. But this year…

It was still early. A lot of things could happen.

Geno finally bought a car, which Sidney found out about when Geno came into the dressing room shaking his key ring and grinning hugely. 

“What’s that, Geno?” Jordy asked.

“He bought a car,” Gonch said, and mimed wiping at his brow.

The room burst into applause.

“What kind of car?” Erik called out.

Geno glanced at Gonch.

“Porsche?” Max asked. “Ferrari? Lamborghini?”

“Range Rover,” Geno said, on familiar ground now. He shot a quick, unreadable look at Sidney. “Like Sid.”

Everyone liked that, and there was a lot of jeering and commotion. Sidney kept his head down, pretending to focus on strapping on his elbow pads. He knew he couldn’t look at Geno without giving everything away.

After practice, Gonch came over to his stall and said, “Zhenya would like you to come see his car.”

Sidney looked over at Geno, who was smiling at him from across the room. “He would?”

“Of course,” Gonch said. “You’re his favorite.”

“He was just saying that,” Sidney said. “He didn’t—”

“No, I think it’s true,” Gonch said. “He feels comfortable with you. He says you speak slowly and you’re easy to understand.”

Imagining Geno talking about him with Gonch gave Sidney a horrible, wonderful squirming sensation in his belly. “Oh,” he said. “Okay. Sure. I’ll come look at it after I’ve changed.”

Sidney knew what a Range Rover looked like; he drove one himself, after all. But the proud, pleased expression on Geno’s face as he stood beside his new car was basically irresistible. 

“Safe,” he told Sidney, very seriously.

“He wanted to buy a sports car,” Gonch explained. “But he already drives like a maniac, and I told him he doesn’t get to take Natalie anywhere unless he buys something safe.”

Geno had been watching Gonch closely, and now he nodded and said, “Natalie. Safe.”

And that was—okay, pretty fucking adorable, that Geno wanted to hang out with Gonch’s daughter so badly he was willing to sacrifice his sports car dreams. 

“It looks good,” Sidney said. “Good decision.”

“Thanks, Sid,” Geno said, once Gonch translated ‘decision’ for him. He was beaming, pleased as punch, and Sidney couldn’t believe how many things he had never known he wanted before.

  


* * *

  


The Lemieux family celebrated both regular and American Thanksgiving, which Sidney supposed made sense. The kids had lived in Pittsburgh all their lives, and maybe it would be weird if they didn’t celebrate the same holidays their friends did. He certainly had no problem with it: twice as much Thanksgiving was nothing but a good thing.

They didn’t have a game that day, and Mario invited a bunch of people over. Sidney spent most of the morning in the kitchen with Nathalie, roped into service chopping celery and peeling carrots. Teaching him to cook was one of Nathalie’s ongoing projects. “It’s a skill every man needs to have,” she told him at the outset, a few months into his rookie year. He was pretty good at it by now, or at least he had stopped cutting himself and burning things.

“This seems like a lot of work,” Sidney said dubiously, watching Nathalie extract a packet of organs from inside the turkey.

“Well,” she said, and winked at him. “That’s why I ordered all of the side dishes from a caterer.”

Mario had invited all of the Americans on the team, and most of them showed up, some with girlfriends in tow. And Melichar came, and Roots, and the Gonchars—and Geno.

“I thought it would be nice for some of our international players to experience an American tradition,” Mario said placidly.

“For sure,” Sidney said. Geno was wearing a sweater that didn’t really fit him and smiling nervously at the horde of Lemieux children that had swarmed him to ask questions about Russia. 

“Is it cold there all the time?” Alexa demanded. Gonch looked like he was trying hard not to laugh.

Through some careful maneuvering, Sidney was able to snag a seat next to Geno at the table. He regretted it almost immediately. Geno was wearing cologne that smelled really good, and he spent almost the entire meal with one hand on the back of Sidney’s chair, just casually hanging out there. He kept pulling faces at Natalie, seated across the table from him and giggling between every bite of mashed potatoes.

“How you say?” Geno asked, pointing to the dressing, and wasn’t satisfied until Sidney had given him the names of everything on the table. Then he said, very decisively, “I like.”

“Which part?” Sidney asked, pointing around and shrugging.

“All,” Geno said, and helped himself to another serving of turkey.

Everyone dispersed into the living room after the meal to watch football and drink more. Sidney was on his third glass of wine and feeling it enough that he knew he should probably stay away from Geno. He went into the little washroom off the kitchen to splash some water on his face. His eyes looked bright and glassy in the mirror. 

When he emerged, Geno was alone in the kitchen, standing by the island to inspect the row of pies. He looked like he was thinking about sneaking a piece.

“Don’t you dare,” Sidney said.

Geno jerked guiltily, and then smiled when he saw who it was. “Good?” he asked.

“Yeah, but not yet,” Sidney said. “Those are for later.” He found himself drifting closer. Geno _liked_ him, unless Max was totally wrong—and Sidney didn’t think he was wrong. He wasn’t totally terrible at reading people, and Geno was so easy to read. It was almost like he _wanted_ to be read, which Sidney didn’t understand at all. 

“Not eat?” Geno asked.

“Later,” Sidney said again, and then noticed Geno’s tongue stuffed between his teeth and his lower lip, stretching out the skin. Teasing him, then, which—okay, probably even in Russia you didn’t just help yourself to pie.

“You live?” Geno asked.

“Yeah, I live here,” Sidney said. Geno had somehow edged a little closer without Sidney noticing, and he could smell Geno’s cologne again.

“I look?” Geno asked, like that was a totally normal thing to request.

It _wasn’t_ normal. Sidney was pretty sure it wasn’t normal. He had people over sometimes, but that was to play video games and hang out, not just to—to _look_. And Geno looked uncertain now, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his shoulders drawn up toward his ears, like maybe he knew it wasn’t normal but had asked anyway.

So Sidney said, “Okay,” and watched Geno’s face light up into a small pleased smile.

He led Geno up the stairs to the top floor, to his suite of rooms tucked beneath the eaves. Geno wandered around the sitting area and looked at Sidney’s DVD collection, his PlayStation crap all over the floor in front of the television. Sidney would have tidied up a little if he’d known he was going to have company.

“Live here,” Geno said. He went over to the window to peer down into the dark yard.

“Yeah,” Sidney said.

“You like?” Geno asked.

“Yeah,” Sidney said again. He liked having the kids and dogs around, and eating Nathalie’s cooking, and not having to worry about, like, paying the electric bill every month. The less he had to think about the routine work of daily life, the more energy he had to devote to hockey.

Geno went over to the door into the bedroom and stopped, probably realizing where it led. He turned to give Sidney a questioning look, and Sidney tried frantically to think if he had left out anything embarrassing. He didn’t think he had. His bedroom was at constant risk of being invaded by pre-teens. 

“It’s okay,” Sidney said.

He hovered in the doorway, feeling weirdly anxious as Geno checked out his unmade bed. Nobody else on the team had been in his bedroom, not even Colby, who was probably his closest friend. Geno picked up the book on Sidney’s nightstand and squinted at the cover. It was just a dumb historical novel, nothing exciting at all, but Sidney’s heart pounded in his chest. Geno couldn’t read much English, was still iffy on the alphabet, but he was curious about what Sidney was reading. It made Sidney feel like he was the most interesting person in the world.

Geno abandoned his snooping eventually and joined Sidney in the doorway. He stood close enough that if Sidney shifted his weight at all, their arms would touch. “Nice,” Geno said.

“Yeah, uh,” Sidney said, and cleared his throat. Geno was _so_ close, and he wanted to take a step back, but maybe that would seem rude. He felt like a dumb kid, nervous just from having Geno nearby. “It’s a nice house.”

Geno gazed down at him. His eyes skated over Sidney’s face, dark and warm, flickering from Sidney’s own eyes down to his mouth, and then back, and then down to his mouth again, unmistakable. 

Sidney was certain, absolutely certain, that Geno was going to kiss him.

He wanted it, so much. He took a shaky breath. Geno shifted just that slightest bit closer, easing fully into Sidney’s personal space. Sidney imagined putting his hand on Geno’s hip, tilting his head up and kissing him, and—

He panicked.

He backed away into the sitting room, his face burning. “Uh, it’s probably time for dessert, so—maybe we should go back downstairs.”

Geno’s hands were back in his pockets. He looked as red as Sidney felt, and Sidney felt like a jerk, because there was no reason for Geno to be embarrassed. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Sidney was the problem, all skittish and—well, scared. It was so new, and Geno was his _teammate_. Sidney didn’t need anyone to tell him it was a bad idea.

But he didn’t know how to reassure Geno without going back over there and kissing him for real. He offered up what he hoped was an encouraging smile and said, “Pie?”

“Yes,” Geno said, after a moment.

God, he couldn’t just leave it at that. Geno looked so ashamed, and maybe also _scared_ , and that was Sidney’s fault. He couldn’t leave Geno to dangle like that.

He couldn’t handle a kiss, but he thought he could probably handle a hug.

He had hugged Geno a bunch of times during games, but it was really different without their pads on. Geno felt much smaller than usual, almost scrawny, although maybe that was mostly in contrast to his bulky on-ice self. 

Geno was stiff at first and unmoving in Sidney’s arms, and Sidney fought down his own embarrassment and held on. After a moment, Geno hugged him back, his hands light and careful on Sidney’s shoulder blades.

“Let’s go eat some pie,” Sidney said, and when he stepped back, Geno was smiling.

  


* * *

  


Sidney had a lot of privacy in his bedroom at the top of the house—at least as long as the kids were at school. A few days after fake Thanksgiving, he went home after practice and locked the door and settled on his bed with his laptop. It was time to do some research.

Thinking about Geno while he jerked off was really great, but fantasies weren’t the same as the real thing. If he was ever faced with Geno’s actual dick, he didn’t want to freak out or act weird or not know what he was doing.

Not that he was _planning_ on anything happening. But you never knew. He had left his shirt off for a while in the locker room after practice, just to see what would happen, and Geno had stared at him kind of a lot. Sidney increasingly felt like he was just delaying the inevitable. _Something_ was going to happen, bad idea or not, terrifying or not, and Sidney hadn’t made it this far in life by being unprepared.

So: porn.

The internet made things really easy. He could look at as many dicks as he wanted to, but what he wanted was _live action_ dicks, two guys kissing and grinding against each other, their hands on each other. And that was easy to find, too, and Sidney watched a few video clips, a lazy hand tucked inside his shorts, playing with himself. Eventually he found a clip with a guy who looked a little like Geno, and he watched that one for a while, chewing on his lip and feeling hot all over. The other guy didn’t look much like Sidney, aside from the dark hair, but Sidney had a decent imagination; it was easy for him to picture himself on the bed with not-Geno, getting his dick sucked. And maybe returning the favor, his mouth on Geno’s cock—

Okay, he liked guys.

But he didn’t think he was gay, and he watched some straight porn for a while, a guy really enthusiastically going down on a woman who was moaning and playing with her nipples and arching her back, and he liked that so much he jerked off until he came.

He could like girls, and like guys, too. That was a thing people did. It wasn’t weird. Nobody had to know, except—maybe Geno. He wanted Geno to know.

  


* * *

  


The night before they played the Devils, Flower organized a Cool Young Gentlemen dinner, nobody over the age of twenty-two allowed. “Okay, I see how it is,” Colby said, when Sidney told him about the age limit. “I don’t need you, anyway. I’ll go out with Brooksie.”

“Sorry,” Sidney said, even though none of it had been his idea. He was still going along with the whole thing. He really wanted Flower to like him.

There were five of them: him, Max, Flower, Jordy, and Geno. Flower was in the lobby when Sidney came out of the elevator, talking with Geno and Gonch. Geno was shaking his head, frowning, and Sidney figured he was probably refusing to go anywhere without Gonch. 

Flower saw him first, catching Sidney’s eye over Geno’s shoulder, and grinned at him. “Sid! Tell Geno to come to dinner with us.”

“Uh,” Sidney said.

Gonch started laughing. “Oh, he’ll go now.”

Sidney liked Gonch, and so he didn’t roll his eyes, even though he really wanted to. The guys were getting a lot of mileage out of Sidney being Geno’s favorite, which maybe should have concerned him, but nobody seemed to think anything of it. Only Max, and Sidney had realized after a while that Max hadn’t meant a _crush_ crush, that he didn’t genuinely think there was anything sexual or—romantic about it, and that maybe he had been a little weirded out by Sidney’s reaction, Sidney taking it way more seriously than he should have.

It kind of pissed him off, that the idea of Geno liking him was _comical._ But that was how things went, in the dressing room. 

And of course Gonch was right, and Geno _did_ go to dinner with them, at a place near the hotel that Flower had picked. There was lasagna, which was most of what Sidney cared about, and Geno sat beside him, which was the rest of it.

They hadn’t interacted much since Thanksgiving. It had only been a week, and they had played three games and practiced and skated and shared planes and buses and meals, but they hadn’t been alone. Sidney wanted to—maybe apologize for freaking out, but Geno didn’t seem too distressed. He still watched Sidney a lot, and smiled when he got caught, a warm secret smile that Sidney loved to see. And now, at dinner, while Jordy and Max were having a really stupid argument about comic books, Geno settled one big hand on Sidney’s leg, just above his knee.

Sidney tried so hard not to react that he forgot to breathe for a few seconds. Geno glanced at him from the corner of his eye, so brave and so uncertain, and Sidney did the only thing he could, which was to carefully place his hand on top of Geno’s. 

Geno sucked in a huge breath that drew a curious glance from Flower.

“He’s excited about dessert,” Sidney said.

“Oh, _he’s_ excited about dessert?” Flower said, grinning.

Hidden by the tablecloth, Geno slowly rotated his wrist so that his hand was palm-up beneath Sidney’s.

“I don’t think Geno actually likes dessert that much,” Max said. “Last time we were in New York, I got some _pain au chocolat_ and he wouldn’t touch it.”

“That isn’t _dessert_ ,” Flower said, “that’s _breakfast_.”

Geno’s hand was warm and callused and a little damp. Sidney’s heart was beating so, so fast. He laced his fingers through Geno’s and squeezed, and then they were—holding hands, sitting there in a restaurant in Newark, with Flower and Max bickering in French about pastries.

“I hate it when they do this,” Jordy said. “Can you guys please speak English?”

“You learn French,” Flower said, and then shot Geno a guilty look. “Sorry, Geno. We don’t mean to be assholes.”

“Oh, you’ll apologize to _him_ but not to _me_?” Jordy said incredulously.

“Yeah, I like him more than I like you,” Flower said, flashing his sweet smile that meant nobody could ever be mad at him for long.

Geno squeezed Sidney’s hand, very gently.

  


* * *

  


Sidney desperately wanted to go back to Geno’s hotel room that night after dinner, or maybe drag Geno back to his, and—kiss him, and maybe—but they both had roommates and there was just no way. 

And then there was hockey, and more planes, and interviews and conference calls and there was no _time_. Sidney would have given just about anything for five minutes alone in the change room with Geno after morning skate, but he had to settle for casting longing glances in Geno’s direction. Geno’s secret smile shifted a little bit every time he saw Sidney looking, became just a little bit more—

Well.

He finally got his chance a few days later, when they were in New York to play the Rangers. Their flight landed mid-afternoon, and they took a bus into Manhattan and were at the hotel with enough time before dinner that Flower and Max made plans to go shopping while they were waiting on the bus for their room keys. 

“You want to come, Sid?” Max asked, when he caught Sidney eavesdropping.

“Oh, uh, I don’t think so,” Sidney said.

“Your loss,” Max said.

Sidney’s room was a few doors down from Max and Geno’s, so then it was simply a matter of waiting to hear Max’s voice out in the corridor, fading away as he headed toward the elevator.

“I’m gonna go get a snack,” Sidney said to Colby.

“Sure,” Colby said absently. He was unpacking with one hand and typing on his phone with the other. He wasn’t paying any attention to Sidney at all.

Sidney walked down the hallway feeling like he was getting away with something, like he was a character in one of those heist movies Jack used to watch all the time. Nobody knew where he was going, and nobody expected him to be anywhere until dinner. He had three hours, a quiet hidden bubble of time, and he could do—anything: whatever Geno wanted.

He knocked on Geno’s door.

“Sid,” Geno said, when he answered. His eyes were really wide. His hair was sticking up at the top. 

“Max left?” Sidney asked, even though he already knew the answer.

Geno swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and he stepped back and let Sidney into the room.

The door closed behind them. Geno turned the deadbolt, and flipped the safety latch for good measure.

Oh, God. This was really happening.

But there was a big empty gap, Grand Canyon-sized, between standing in Geno’s hotel room and—doing whatever, kissing or whatever, and Sidney wasn’t sure how to get from point A to point B. Was he just supposed to grab Geno and go for it? He felt so awkward, and mad at himself for being awkward. He wasn’t some dumb clueless virgin anymore. This shouldn’t be so complicated.

Geno looked just as awkward and unsure, though, which made Sidney feel better. Geno was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and as Sidney kept watching him without saying anything, Geno raised one hand to scratch nervously at the back of his head.

Shit, maybe _Geno_ was a virgin. But Sidney found that a little hard to believe.

“Uh,” Geno said.

“Oh, fuck this,” Sidney said, and shoved Geno back against the door and pushed up onto his toes and carefully pressed their mouths together.

There. He did it.

He rocked back on his heels, face flaming, gripped by a sudden idiotic panic. Maybe he had read everything wrong—

But Geno was staring down at him with dark eyes, his lips parted. He set one hand on Sidney’s hip, and that wasn’t a grossed-out touch, or a sorry-just-friends touch. That was someone who wanted Sidney to kiss him again.

Sidney grabbed a fistful of Geno’s shirt and tugged him down.

The second kiss was a real kiss. Geno wrapped an arm around Sidney’s back and held him there, and Sidney kissed Geno’s lower lip, just as full and soft as he had imagined. His eyes slid shut. Geno made a quiet hungry sound and opened his mouth, and the first touch of Geno’s tongue made Sidney feel so tingly and warm. It was even better than he had thought it might be.

“Sid,” Geno murmured after a few slow hot perfect minutes. He pulled back and kissed Sidney’s cheek and the corner of his mouth. “You like?”

“Yeah,” Sidney said, meaning both the kissing and Geno himself. And then he decided he probably needed to say it, so he said, “I, uh. I like you.”

“Like,” Geno said, grinning, and Sidney slid his hands beneath Geno’s shirt to stroke the smooth soft skin of his lower back, and kissed him again.

He didn’t want to stop, but they had to, eventually. Max wouldn’t stay out forever, and the thought of getting caught made Sidney’s stomach turn over in a bad way. 

“I should go,” he said against Geno’s mouth.

Geno’s arm tightened briefly, and then he released Sidney with a sigh. “Max,” he said.

“Yeah,” Sidney said. He took a step back and straightened his shirt, and then, embarrassed, reached down to adjust himself in his jeans. Geno’s eyes followed the movement, and Sidney’s embarrassment vanished when Geno groaned and dropped his head back against the door.

“Sid,” Geno complained.

“You know we can’t,” Sidney said. “But, uh.” God, Geno’s mouth was so wet from kissing. “Once we’re back home. In Pittsburgh.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Geno said fervently, and they kissed for a while longer before Sidney finally tore himself away and left.

  


* * *

  


Sidney suffered through the remainder of that road trip: down to Atlanta to play the Thrashers, and then to DC to play the Capitals. They won both games, which helped, but Geno racked up five points off some filthy beautiful hockey, which didn’t help at all. Geno was so focused when he was on the ice, serious and driven, and then exploding into incandescent joy when he scored a goal. Sidney was basically hardwired to find that attractive.

But he couldn’t do anything about it on the road, and so he jerked off disconsolately in the shower every morning and ignored Colby’s complaining about how he was hogging the washroom.

The plane landed in Pittsburgh after midnight, and Gonch and Geno headed directly for Gonch’s car before Sidney could say anything. So when he woke up the next morning, he spent a while drafting the perfect text message before he remembered there was no guarantee Geno would be able to read it.

 _Fuck._ He should have planned this better.

Well, if he could send a text, he could call Geno just as easily, and Geno would just have to suffer through it. Sidney was fed up with waiting.

The phone rang for long enough that Sidney thought Geno maybe wasn’t going to answer, but finally he picked up and said something in Russian. He sounded grumpy. It wasn’t that early, but Sidney got the distinct impression he had woken Geno up.

“Uh, this is Sid,” he said. “Hi.”

“Sid,” Geno said, sounding marginally more awake and infinitely less grumpy. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Sidney said again, smiling helplessly. “Do you want to come over?”

There was a pause. “To house?” Geno said.

“Yeah,” Sidney said. “If you want to. You can come here.”

Another pause, as Geno worked that through. “Okay.”

“Okay, I’m at home now,” Sidney said. “So you should come over.” He hoped he sounded cool and confident. He didn’t feel cool at all, possibly the least cool he had ever been in his life. 

It was too cold to wait out in the yard the way he really wanted to, so he waited at the side door in the mud room. He wasn’t sure Geno had understood that Sidney wanted him to come over _right now_ , but it wasn’t long before he saw Geno’s car pull up at the gate, and Sidney went out to let him in. 

Geno’s hair was wet, like he hadn’t even bothered to towel it dry before he drove over. He climbed out of the car and he was just—really cute, the way he ducked his head and smiled at Sidney, the ugly scarf draped around his neck.

“Hi, Sid,” Geno said. He looked so openly happy that Sidney couldn’t cope with it at all.

“Hi,” Sidney said. He was going to explode, or die. He needed to kiss Geno right away, but the Lemieux driveway probably wasn’t the best place for it.

He clasped Geno’s gloved hand and towed him toward the house.

It was a Tuesday; the kids were at school, and Mario and Nathalie were both out. But there was nothing strange about having friends over, Sidney told himself. He’d had friends over before. If Nathalie came home and Geno’s car was in the driveway, that was totally normal. Nobody would be suspicious at all.

He led Geno upstairs and into his bedroom, and locked the door behind them, and he refused to be embarrassed about it. He didn’t want to be interrupted.

Geno shucked his coat and took off his shoes, and then he started roaming around the room, like he hadn’t already investigated everything in Sidney’s bedroom. The gray light through the windows made Sidney think it might snow later. He was starting to get hard already just from thinking about what he and Geno might do. He really wanted Geno to quit rooting around in the nightstand drawer and come over and _kiss_ him.

But Geno straightened up then with something in his hand—a strip of condoms, Sidney realized. Geno was grinning, his eyebrows up. 

“What?” Sidney said. He had forgotten those were in there. Condoms were a totally normal thing to have in your nightstand. There was no reason for Geno to look so—whatever.

“We use?” Geno asked, and Sidney’s face and neck and chest flushed hot, because he had thought about doing a lot of things with Geno, but he hadn’t thought about _that_.

“I—maybe,” he said. “Sure.”

Geno gave him a long look, and then dropped the condoms in the drawer and closed it. He crossed the room and took Sidney’s face in his hands. “Sid,” he said, and sighed heavily, and added something in Russian. His hands were cold. He stroked Sidney’s cheeks with his thumbs and leaned in and kissed him.

The touch of his mouth was just as good as Sidney remembered, and then Geno slid his tongue along Sidney’s lower lip and it was even better. He hooked his fingers in Geno’s belt loops and tugged him in. Geno laughed against his mouth. Nothing was funny. Sidney pressed himself against Geno and kissed him and kissed him and felt Geno’s hands drop to his shoulders, very polite.

Sidney didn’t want polite. They were close, but not close enough. Geno was warm and solid against him, but Sidney wanted to feel all of Geno against him and touch him and hear him make the same soft sweet noises he had made in the hotel room in New York. He shoved at Geno with his hips and walked him backward toward the bed, and Geno laughed again and wrapped his arms around Sidney’s neck and they fell down together onto the mattress.

Having Geno beneath him was immediately more than Sidney could handle. He could feel that Geno was hard, the hot bulk of his erection wedged against Sidney’s hip. Geno drew one knee up and planted his foot on the bed, and then Sidney could kiss him and rub against him, slow hot friction turning his spine molten. 

Geno’s kisses were careless and messy. He was generous with his tongue, and generous with his hands, sliding down Sidney’s back and then up again beneath Sidney’s t-shirt. His fingers were light and teasing as he stroked Sidney’s bare skin. Sidney twitched and shivered with each touch, oversensitive. Geno was so long and warm and he kissed so confidently. Sidney slid his hands into Geno’s hair and tilted Geno’s head just how he wanted it, so their mouths slotted together perfectly.

Geno broke away at last to kiss along Sidney’s jaw. “Off,” he said, “this,” and tugged at the hem of Sidney’s shirt.

Oh, God. Sidney hadn’t let himself hope for more than kissing, but—they were in bed together, and they probably weren’t going to stop at kissing. He ground his hips down and watched Geno’s mouth fall open. 

“ _Off_ ,” Geno said again, more insistently, and Sidney sat up to pull off his shirt, and then reached down to yank at Geno’s. Geno laughed and raised his arms above his head, and laughed harder when the shirt got stuck and Sidney had to ease the collar over his nose and ears.

“Sex is serious business, pal,” Sidney said, and dropped Geno’s shirt on the floor. 

Geno shrugged at him and said something in Russian. Sidney saw him shirtless all the time, but this was categorically different, Geno shirtless in his bed and waiting for Sidney to touch him.

God. Sidney straddled Geno’s hips and ran his hands down Geno’s chest, stroking over his shoulders and pinching carefully at his nipples, then a little less carefully when Geno arched into it. Geno _wanted_ this, wanted Sidney, and maybe Sidney hadn’t totally realized what that meant, that Geno didn’t only want to stare at him in the locker room. Geno wanted to kiss him, and touch him, and be kissed and touched by him, and all of it was pretty fucking great.

“Good,” Geno said. He curled his hands around Sidney’s hips and guided him through another slow grind. “Sid, you—okay?”

“What,” Sidney said dumbly. 

Geno made a frustrated noise and thumbed at the button of Sidney’s jeans. His fingers brushed over the aching bulge of Sidney’s dick, and Sidney jerked helplessly into the touch.

“Geno,” he said, his mouth dry.

“Want?” Geno asked. He chewed on his lip, looking uncertain. His thumb traced the circumference of the button.

Sidney wanted it so much. He was shaky with nerves, balanced on the edge of this huge new thing. If they did it, they couldn’t ever take it back. He knew that if he talked to someone about this, someone he trusted, Nathalie or Jack or his mother, they would probably tell him that it was okay to like boys, and that he deserved to have a personal life, but that he needed to be discreet about it, and he shouldn’t fool around with someone on his team, especially not someone as important as Geno. Sidney could see the writing on the wall, and he knew he and Geno would probably be in Pittsburgh together for a long time. But he didn’t care. He didn’t know where he would find someone else who looked at him the way Geno did. He couldn’t imagine wanting to touch someone else as much as he wanted to touch Geno.

“We aren’t going to fuck things up,” he told Geno fiercely. “It’s going to be good. Okay?”

“Okay,” Geno said, with the blank look that meant he didn’t have a clue what Sidney had just said.

“I know what I’m doing,” Sidney said, lying through his teeth, and knocked Geno’s hand away to unbutton and unzip his own jeans. 

“Sid,” Geno breathed. He slid his hand into the open fly of Sidney’s pants and squeezed, and Sidney felt all the air leave his lungs in a hot soundless rush.

“Come on, your—take your pants off,” Sidney said, and started squirming out of his own until Geno got the message.

They flopped around on the bed together, laughing and struggling with their pants and underwear. Sidney was so mesmerized by the bright humor in Geno’s eyes, the playful jut of his chin, that he forgot to be embarrassed until it was too late: they were naked, and Geno was pulling Sidney on top of him again, their legs tangling together, the wet head of Geno’s cock nudging at Sidney’s belly.

“ _Oh_ ,” Sidney said.

“Yes,” Geno said. He kissed Sidney again, and slid his hands down Sidney’s back to grip his ass and rock their hips together, and that—oh—

Sidney caught the rhythm quickly. There was nothing in the world but him and Geno, their sloppy kisses, the mattress creaking beneath them, the two of them carefully locked away in the high bright quiet room. Geno braced both feet on the bed and really shamelessly rubbed his dick against Sidney’s hip, getting himself off with Sidney’s body. He started letting out these long breaths that were right on the edge of being outright moans, and each successive noise crept a little bit further beneath Sidney’s skin. 

“Geno,” he said desperately, kissing Geno’s neck, using his teeth a little when Geno made an encouraging sound. Geno was shaking steadily, clutching at Sidney’s back, his own back a tight arch, and somehow Sidney was still taken by surprise when Geno let out an actual moan and came between their bodies in a hot slick rush.

“Ohh, oh _Sid_ ,” Geno said, breathless, his head tipped back, and Sidney sucked a wet kiss beneath Geno’s ear and tried not to move. It was _hard_. Feeling Geno fall apart beneath him had been, well, fantastic, and he was getting pretty frantic about his own impending orgasm.

Geno said something in Russian, clamped his legs around Sidney’s waist, and flipped them. 

“Oh,” Sidney said. That was kind of hot.

Geno smirked at him. He ran a hand down Sidney’s belly to curl around his dick, smearing his own come across Sidney’s abdomen, and then glanced down and raised his eyebrows. “Big,” he said.

“Uh,” Sidney said.

Geno looked up at him, grinning widely now. “No?”

“I’m not—it’s normal,” Sidney said, his face heating up.

“Big,” Geno said firmly. He glanced down again and licked his lips. “I like.” Then he turned red, and scowled, which wasn’t an expression Sidney enjoyed having directed at his dick.

“Hey,” he said, pushing up onto his elbows to get a better look at Geno’s face. “Geno, what’s going on?”

Geno didn’t respond, except to scowl harder and then squirm his way down the bed and get his mouth on Sidney’s dick.

“Oh holy shit,” Sidney said. He flopped back against the mattress. “Geno, Geno—”

Geno ignored him. Sidney had gotten blowjobs before, but it was immediately clear that Geno was _really_ good at it, and Sidney’s three remaining brain cells managed to wonder when Geno had gotten so much practice. But after another moment, the soft wet suction of Geno’s mouth wiped every thought out of his head.

“Geno, I can’t last,” he said, “I’m gonna come,” and how did you warn someone who barely spoke English? He tugged gently at Geno’s hair. “I’m gonna—Geno!” Because Geno was ignoring him, pinning his hips to the bed and sucking hard, and Sidney twisted against the mattress and shouted and came in Geno’s mouth.

His heartbeat pounded in his ears. He lay sprawled in the blankets and tried to remember how to move, or talk.

Geno sat up, licking a stray trace of come from the corner of his mouth. “Good?” he asked. He looked pretty pleased with himself, and Sidney thought he probably deserved to. But he also looked kind of embarrassed, which Sidney didn’t understand. There wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about. 

“Fuck, are you kidding me,” Sidney said. “It was the best.” He lifted an arm in invitation, and Geno crawled up the bed and happily tucked himself in against Sidney’s side, resting his head on Sidney’s shoulder with a contented sigh.

For a few minutes, Sidney just floated in a blissful daze. They were both kind of sweaty, and there was more drying semen on Sidney’s body than he was strictly comfortable with, but it was so nice to lie there with Geno curled up against him and stroking his fingers along Sidney’s hip.

“Sid,” Geno said. “You do? With boy.” 

Sidney let out a breath. “Only with girls,” he said. It felt okay to admit that now, after they were finished. Geno had gotten off pretty hard, so Sidney didn’t feel terrible about his performance. “You’re my first, uh. My first guy.”

Geno made a soft sound and turned his face against Sidney’s neck.

Sidney had no idea how to interpret that. “Was it okay? I know there’s probably—room for improvement.”

“Room?” Geno asked, his voice muffled.

Right: idioms. “I can get better,” he said. “I’ll get better.”

Geno lifted his head and gave Sidney a considering look. Then he smiled, very smugly. “I show,” he said.

And—okay, Sidney liked the idea of Geno teaching him what to do, kind of a lot.

“Good now,” Geno said. “Good. I like.” He sighed, his frustrated sigh for when he didn’t have the words to say what he wanted to. “English,” he complained.

Sidney smiled and tugged him closer. He was stupidly charmed by basically everything Geno did. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t really converse. They spoke to each other with hockey, and with their bodies. Sidney felt like he knew all of the important things about Geno, the stuff that really mattered, and the rest of it would fill in as Geno learned more English. But none of it would change the way he felt about Geno. He understood Geno at an elemental level, blood and microbes. They _got_ each other.

Geno shifted against him after a while, moving like he was thinking about getting up. Sidney tightened his arm and said, “You can stay if you want. We can have lunch, and—maybe hang out.”

“Okay,” Geno said, and huffed a soft laugh, and he stayed.

  


* * *

  


He saw Geno at skate the next morning, before the Flyers game. Geno came into the dressing room with Gonch and Sidney had to pretend to look for something in his bag to cover up his helpless besotted smile. When he risked a glance at Geno, a few minutes later, Geno was watching him, and when he caught Sidney’s gaze, he _winked_.

Jeez. Sidney didn’t know what his face was doing, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t appropriate for public.

They’d had _sex_. Sidney wanted to do it again, as often as Geno would let him.

They did it again the very next day after practice. Sidney managed to catch Geno sans Gonch in the change room. “Want to come over?” he muttered, and Geno squinted at him for a moment and then clearly _got it_.

“Yes,” he said hoarsely, and Sidney wasn’t at home for very long at all before Geno’s car pulled up at the gate.

It was really good, hot and fun and sexy. Geno blew him again and then let Sidney have a try, and didn’t seem to mind when Sidney couldn’t handle much more than sucking on the head without gagging. “Try, learn,” Geno said, petting gently at Sidney’s hair, and Sidney burrowed his hot face into Geno’s thigh for a minute, embarrassed and eager, before he tried again.

Geno made a lot of noise when he came, so all in all Sidney felt pretty good about his first attempt.

Before Geno went home, Sidney pulled out his phone and showed Geno what the words _Come over_ looked like. “Or you can text me,” he said. “Whenever you want. I’ll probably have to say no sometimes, but I think this is the best way for us to, uh. Make plans.”

“Okay, text,” Geno said, smiling, and leaned in to give Sidney a kiss that covered just about all the bases. 

That was what Sidney did for the next couple of months: hockey, and Geno. He didn’t know what Geno said to Gonch about it, but Geno came over at least a couple of times a week, and Gonch didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about it.

“I hope you’re at least speaking English to him in between playing all those video games,” Gonch said to Sidney one day before practice, and Sidney felt really smooth and mature when he managed to say, without any floundering around, “I think I’m teaching him how to trash talk, does that count?”

Gonch laughed. “I think it counts. It’s good for him to do this with you. He only sat in the house before and watched movies and talked to his friends from home. That’s not good for a young man.”

“Oh,” Sidney said guiltily. That sounded pretty sad, like maybe Geno had been lonely, and maybe Sidney should have done something about it a while ago. Well, better late than never.

He was kind of embarrassingly into Geno’s everything. They had a few days off before Christmas, and his parents and sister flew down to spend the holiday with him, and then stayed through New Year’s since Taylor was out of school. Sidney spent the whole time thinking about Geno. He tried really hard not to show it, because he loved his family and missed them a lot during the season, but he also wanted to have sex with Geno all the time.

In January, after a short road trip down to Florida, Geno came over with a stubborn look on his face and a backpack slung over his shoulder.

“What’s that?” Sidney asked, when he let Geno in through the mud room door.

“Book,” Geno said, and wouldn’t let Sidney herd him directly upstairs like usual. Mario and Nathalie certainly knew that Geno was coming over a lot, but Sidney didn’t see any need to parade him around more than necessary. He knew that if Geno were a girl, everyone would think they were dating, and it made him feel kind of weird that he was relying on people’s assumptions in order to get away with all of the sex and sneaking around.

But Geno wouldn’t go upstairs; he marched determinedly into the kitchen, and set his backpack down on the breakfast table.

“Geno, come on,” Sidney said. “What’s up?”

Geno didn’t reply. He unzipped the backpack and pulled out a spiral-bound notebook and a pen, and what Sidney realized after a moment was an English textbook. He knew that Geno had been doing Rosetta Stone and working with a tutor, but Geno had been kind of secretive about it before, shrugging off any questions about how it was going. Sidney didn’t know what had changed now.

Geno sat down at the table and opened the notebook, and gave Sidney an expectant look. “I work,” he said. “You help.”

“For sure,” Sidney said, and he felt warm and pleased to be asked, to have Geno trust him with this. 

Geno was working on prepositions. “How ‘for’?” he demanded, pointing to the picture in the example. “Not ‘on’?”

“Oh boy,” Sidney said. “Uh, that’s just how you say it.”

“You not know?” Geno said incredulously.

“I never told you I was any good at grammar!” Sidney said. “That’s just the way it is. You wait _for_ someone. Well, I guess you can also wait _on_ someone, but that’s different?”

Geno groaned.

Nathalie came into the kitchen after a while, when they had moved on to the difference between ‘on’ and ‘in,’ which Sidney felt more confident about. “Hockey skates,” he said, and Geno squinted and said, “On feet. In bag,” and Sidney grinned and looked up to see Nathalie standing by the sink, holding an empty glass and watching them.

“Oh,” Sidney said. He reminded himself that they weren’t doing anything wrong. “Hi, Nathalie.”

“Hi, boys,” Nathalie said, smiling. “No, don’t get up,” because Geno had pushed back his chair. “I didn’t know the two of you were down here.”

“Sorry,” Sidney said. “We can go upstairs—”

“This is your home,” Nathalie said firmly. “I only meant that I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Not interrupt,” Geno said. “Not, uh.” He thought for a moment, and then shrugged, giving up.

“Would you two like a snack?” Nathalie asked.

“Oh, you don’t have to,” Sidney said, but Geno had perked up at the word ‘snack,’ and Nathalie was already opening the refrigerator.

Nathalie made them a big plate of bread and cheese and sliced meat and fruit, and then she left them alone to tackle the rest of Geno’s homework. Geno’s reading comprehension was better than it had been even a few months ago, but he still went slowly and had to sound out a lot of words. Sidney felt a big overpowering fondness for him, trying so hard to learn a new language and make a life for himself here.

“Hey,” he said, and bumped his feet against Geno’s when Geno looked up. “You’re doing really well, okay? You’re working hard. You’ll get there.”

“Thanks, Sid,” Geno said quietly, looking down at his notebook again, his mouth curving into a small smile.

That became their pattern: English first, and then when Geno decided they were done, usually when he was too frustrated to keep going, they would go upstairs and screw around. Sidney tried to angle for sex first and English after, but Geno wasn’t having any of it. “Work now,” Geno insisted, and forced Sidney to explain the difference between ‘a’ and ‘the,’ which was basically impossible.

It was dumb and kind of selfish, but to some extent Sidney didn’t care whether Geno learned English. He knew he could be annoying; he knew the veterans on the team were sick of him telling them what to do during games. But here with Geno, he never said the wrong thing. As Geno learned more English, maybe he would stop liking Sidney so much. Everything was perfect right now, and Sidney didn’t want anything to change.

  


* * *

  


The good stuff with Geno helped Sidney ignore the terrible stuff with the team that he couldn’t do anything about. Mario was stressed out all the time, and frankly Sidney had no real desire to move to Missouri, but mostly he just wanted to _know_. 

Toward the end of January, he and Geno and Jordy and Whits headed to Dallas for the All-Star week. Sidney was sort of dreading it. He would have to spend a lot of time talking to the media, and the whole thing was kind of absurd and pointless. But once Geno was named to the YoungStars roster, he started to look forward to it a little. They would have four days in Dallas before the rest of the team arrived for an away game against the Stars, and Sidney planned to take full advantage of the relative lack of nosy teammates.

The media obligations were as bad as he expected. Talking to the press was a big part of his job, and he didn’t mind talking with reporters after games or practices, especially now that he had gotten to know a lot of the regulars. But he didn’t want to talk about Kansas City, and he really didn’t want to film any dumb embarrassing commercials. But it was all worth it when he could go back to his hotel room the first night, after everything was over, and text Geno. 

Geno knocked on his door a few minutes later, wearing the mischievous expression Sidney had already come to love. “Vodka,” he said, offering Sidney a bottle.

Sidney laughed. “Where did you get this?”

“Ovechkin,” Geno said, which: of course.

They drank some vodka, not too much, and watched TV. Max had gotten Geno hooked on some reality show about bored housewives in California, and Geno muted the television and invented his own dialogue. “Stop, ugly face,” he said. “Don’t talk!” Then he pitched his voice a little higher and said, “How you say me! I cry.” Sidney laughed until he tipped sideways on the bed, and Geno grinned at him, pleased as always when he could make Sidney laugh.

Watching television turned into kissing after a while, and kissing very quickly turned into sex. They had to be quiet, they had to be pretty careful, but Geno spent the whole night in Sidney’s bed and grumbled a lot in the morning when he had to sneak out.

“Want stay,” he said, burying his face in Sidney’s chest, “warm, nice,” and Sidney felt ten meters tall. 

The team flew in the day before they played the Stars, and then Sidney’s hotel room idyll was over: he was back with Colby.

“Missed you, Creature,” Colby said, grinning and dropping his duffel on the bed. “You have fun rubbing elbows with the rich and famous? Did Ovi play nice?”

“Ovi’s fine,” Sidney said. “We gave Shanahan a birthday cake.”

Colby laughed. “Surprised you didn’t eat the whole thing yourself.”

“Har har,” Sidney said sarcastically, and Colby noogied him until he shrieked for mercy.

They all went out to dinner that night. Geno sat at a different table, and Sidney tried not to watch him too obviously and probably failed. He hadn’t thought it was possible to still have a crush on someone once you started sleeping with them, but his crush on Geno hadn’t gone away. If anything, it had gotten worse. He craved Geno’s attention, and felt both smug and flustered when he got it. 

“Lovers’ quarrel?” Scuds asked, nudging Sidney with one elbow.

“We don’t always sit together,” Sidney said. By now it was old news to the team that he and Geno were friends, and Sidney got enough nonchalant chirping about it that he was able to play it totally cool. 

Jordy scoffed. “I tried to sit next to him on the plane on the way out here and he told me that was your seat and I had to get out.”

“Wow, he strung that many words together?” Scuds asked.

“Well, no, but I knew what he meant,” Jordy said.

Sidney’s level of cool was dropping rapidly. He was way too happy about the idea of Geno saving a seat for him. “We’re friends,” he said. “Maybe if you assholes tried to talk to him more—”

“The dude is selectively mute,” Scuds said. “Which I get. But I try to talk to him and he just looks nervous and clings to Gonch’s trouser leg. The fuck do the two of you talk about, anyway?”

Sidney shrugged. “We play a lot of video games.” They had never, in fact, played any video games together, but Sidney had decided it was a good euphemism for blowjobs. He was getting to be pretty good at giving head.

“Whatever you say, kid,” Scuds said. “You gonna finish those fries?”

“Yes,” Sidney said, but then he gave most of them to Scuds anyway.

  


* * *

  


January turned into February. Geno was getting a ton of Calder buzz. Sidney was willing to begin admitting to himself, privately, that they were probably going to make the playoffs. He felt it under his skin all the time: a simmering excitement.

Geno’s hockey was great, and his English was getting better. He seemed to understand most of what Sidney said to him, as long as Sidney didn’t speak too quickly or use hard words. Maybe Sidney was helping some, or maybe it was just hearing English all the time and working with his tutor, but either way he was making progress. He understood more than he could say, and he was still quiet with the team and almost silent with strangers, shy about his accent and his imaginative grammar; but he was making progress.

Sidney had totally changed his mind about Geno learning English. He wanted Geno to be fluent _right now_ so they could talk about everything. He wanted to know everything about Geno, everything there was to know. Probably Geno wouldn’t like him any less.

Geno came over one afternoon after practice with a strange expression on his face. He was holding a plastic grocery bag. He didn’t have his backpack, for once, and he shouldered past Sidney and headed for the stairs instead of the kitchen.

“Hey, what’s up?” Sidney asked, trailing after him.

Geno grunted instead of replying. Sidney followed him up the stairs, mystified. Geno could get into weird moods sometimes, but Sidney had never seen him quite like this. 

“Sit,” Geno said, pointing at Sidney’s couch, and Sidney did, an instinctive response to being ordered around. Geno went into the bedroom for a minute and then came out again, still holding the plastic bag. He reached into it and took out one of those boxes of chocolates shaped like a heart. There was a velvet ribbon on it, tied into a crisp bow.

“Oh,” Sidney said. “I—that’s for me?”

“Yes,” Geno said. His ears were red. He held out the box, and Sidney took it carefully, holding it like maybe it would explode in his hands.

“Oh,” he said again. Valentine’s Day was in a couple of days, but Sidney didn’t—he hadn’t thought about it. It was just a dumb, made-up holiday. But Geno had his jaw set, and he was getting redder the longer Sidney held the chocolates and didn’t say anything. Sidney said, stupidly, “I didn’t get you anything.”

Geno rolled his eyes. “You like,” he said, gesturing at the box. “Taste good. Sweet.”

“Yeah,” Sidney said. He turned the box over. It was good stuff, expensive. And Geno had gone out to buy it for him, and Sidney knew he would never get over his crush, not if he lived to be a hundred years old. “Thanks, Geno. I should have—I didn’t know we were doing anything.”

Geno was watching him, arms folded. He tipped his head toward the bedroom and said, “Go. Take clothes.”

Shit. Sidney scrambled off the couch and almost ate a faceful of carpet on the way.

He had never seen Geno act like this. He stripped down with trembling hands and lay down on the bed, and then waited and waited. “Geno?” he called out after a minute, just totally in the dark about what was going on, and finally Geno came into the bedroom, already naked. 

Sidney swallowed, hearing his throat click.

“Up, sit,” Geno said, and Sidney shifted until he was sitting back against the pillows, leaning against the headboard.

Geno opened the drawer of the nightstand and took out a condom and a bottle of lube, and that must have been in the bag; he had brought it so they could—

God.

They hadn’t done that, mainly because Geno hadn’t brought it up and Sidney felt too shy to raise the subject. But Geno had obviously decided it was time.

Geno dropped the lube and the condom on top of the nightstand and climbed on the bed to straddle Sidney’s lap.

 _Oh._ Sidney put his shaking hands on Geno’s hips. “Geno…”

Geno’s face was red, still or again. He wouldn’t make eye contact. He took one of Sidney’s hands and drew it back to rest on the curve of his ass.

“Geno,” Sidney said unsteadily. “We don’t have to.” It killed him to say so, because he really, really wanted to, but Geno seemed _so_ uncomfortable.

“I like,” Geno said, with one swift defiant glance at Sidney before he dropped his gaze again.

Sidney looked down. Geno was fully hard, his cock drawn up against his belly. Sidney slid his hand over Geno’s ass and Geno shivered and clutched at Sidney’s shoulders.

“Okay,” Sidney said, hushed. “What do I do?”

Geno showed him. He lubed up Sidney’s fingers and said, “Slow, only touch.” Sidney held Geno open with his clean hand and very carefully touched his fingertips to the small hidden divot of Geno’s asshole. “Good,” Geno said, and Sidney stroked him gently, feeling Geno twitch and tremble in his lap.

“Hey,” Sidney said. Geno was too far away to kiss, but Sidney really wanted to kiss him. “Come on. Hey.”

Geno shook his head and wrapped his arms around Sidney’s neck and hid his face against Sidney’s hair. They were plastered so close together that Sidney could feel the wet head of Geno’s dick dragging against his abs as Geno shifted on his lap. Sidney was already feeling overheated and out of control, but he had to keep it together because Geno seemed like he was going to totally fall apart.

With a few quiet words and the rich expressive language of his body, Geno guided Sidney through the process of working him open. He was so tight and hot and smooth inside, clutching at Sidney’s fingers. He shook and shuddered, and then cried out when Sidney twisted his fingers experimentally.

“Right there?” Sidney asked, and tried that again.

Geno nodded tightly, his chin brushing against Sidney's ear. Sidney always loved having sex with Geno, always thought he was hot and desirable, but seeing him come undone like this was well beyond anything he knew how to handle. He slowly pushed a third finger into Geno’s ass, and by then Geno was shaking constantly, wound so tight that Sidney was honestly surprised he hadn’t come already.

“Do we need to stop?” he whispered into Geno’s neck, because Geno’s noises sounded _hurt_.

“No, no,” Geno said, clinging to him. “I want. Please, Sid.”

Geno never asked for anything. He wasn’t shy in bed, he would put Sidney’s hands wherever he wanted them, but he didn’t ask. He didn’t say _please_ like that, like maybe he would die if he didn’t get it.

Sidney kissed every part of Geno he could reach, his shoulder and his jaw, and breathed in the familiar smell of Geno’s body wash. Geno was just—he was so great, and Sidney wished he would stop hiding, because he really wanted to be able to see Geno’s face.

“Okay,” Geno said. He leaned over to grab the condom from the nightstand, and Sidney had to close his eyes for a moment and take a few deep breaths. He eased his fingers out and rubbed them over Geno’s hole, feeling how easy it was for him now, stretched and ready. Oh, God, he was going to come way too fast, and Geno would never want to do this with him again.

When he opened his eyes again, Geno had shifted backward slightly and opened the condom. He was breathing fast and shallow and running his tongue along his lower lip. A blotchy flush had spread down to his chest. Sidney was trying so hard to ignore his own arousal, but it was pretty fucking challenging when Geno looked like he had crawled straight out of Sidney’s fantasies.

“Let me do it,” he said, and took the condom from Geno’s hand. His cock twitched as he rolled it on. Geno watched intently, his hands on Sidney’s shoulders for balance, and as soon as Sidney was done he pushed up onto his knees and shuffled forward, and reached behind himself to guide Sidney into position.

“Stop watch me,” Geno said, scowling at him, but Sidney couldn’t stop staring, mesmerized by the way Geno’s mouth hung open as he sank down, tight hot mind-blowing friction around Sidney’s dick. Geno didn’t stop until Sidney was balls-deep inside of him, Geno’s ass resting on Sidney’s thighs.

Sidney swore under his breath. His dick was throbbing. He put his hands on Geno’s hips and tugged him in closer. “You feel really good,” he said.

Geno’s mouth twisted. He braced himself against Sidney’s shoulders and rocked his hips, nothing more than a tease. “Sid,” he said, and pushed up onto his knees again, until the head of Sidney’s cock was just kissing at his hole, and then he dropped down again, the stretch and the slow searing glide.

Geno cried out and scrabbled at the headboard, gripping there and sitting on Sidney’s lap and panting. “Geno, Geno,” Sidney murmured, petting at him, feeling a little frantic with the need to thrust, but forcing himself to hold still and let Geno run the show. But Geno was just _sitting_ there, driving Sidney crazy, until finally he drew an unsteady breath and lifted all the way off again.

“Sid, I,” Geno said, and took one hand off the headboard to grab at his own dick, and as he sank down he started to come, opening around Sidney’s cock and shuddering and coating his fingers and Sidney’s belly.

“Oh my God,” Sidney said, clutching at him, because this was basically the hottest thing that had ever happened to him.

Geno trembled through it, his head thrown back, and then he hunched down, making himself smaller, and pushed his hot face against Sidney’s neck. “I—I, Sid,” he said, and then mumbled something in Russian.

Sidney wrapped both of his arms around Geno’s waist and pulled him in as close as he would go. Geno’s thighs were twitching with aftershocks, and Sidney held him and kissed his ear and his shoulder and tried not to move, but he just couldn’t. He was so turned on, and he couldn’t wait. He flexed his hips, just barely pushing into Geno’s tight heat, and Geno hissed and sat up again, staring down at Sidney, expressionless.

“Sorry, sorry,” Sidney said, “you’re just,” and then he forgot whatever he was planning to say when Geno rolled his hips in a lazy circle and grabbed the headboard again and started to ride Sidney slow and hard.

After all of that, Sidney didn’t feel too bad about the noises he made, or the way he clung to Geno and came pretty soon thereafter.

They lay tangled together afterward, Geno hiding his face again, his head stubbornly turned into Sidney’s neck. Sidney stroked Geno’s sweaty back and waited for his brain to come back online.

When it finally did, he said, “You don’t have to be embarrassed about liking that, you know.”

Geno shook his head and pushed his face more firmly against Sidney’s skin.

“I mean it,” Sidney said. “That was so hot, I—it was really great. For me. I love how much you liked it. I was really into it. I really want to do it again. I mean, if you want to.”

Geno didn’t say anything for a long time, and Sidney waited and stroked him and tried not to panic. Finally, Geno said, “I want. I like.”

“I don’t want you to be embarrassed,” Sidney said. “Okay? There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

Geno shook his head again. “Okay,” he muttered.

“Geno,” Sidney said, and hesitated, because maybe this wasn’t the best time. Geno was already feeling defensive, and maybe—

“What,” Geno said.

Well, fuck it. “Do you ever, uh. Do stuff with girls?”

Geno sat up, which wasn’t really the reaction Sidney wanted. His hair was all messed up, curling out of control the way it did when it got sweaty. “No,” he said. His chin jutted out stubbornly, like he was daring Sidney to say something. “No girls.”

“Okay,” Sidney said. He sat up too, and put his arms around Geno’s shoulders. “I was just wondering.”

“Wonder,” Geno muttered.

“It’s okay if you don’t like girls,” Sidney said. “I just wanted to know.”

“Only boys, for me,” Geno said quietly. He looked down at his hands, frowning, and then glanced sideways at Sidney. “Okay?”

“Yeah, I—of course it is,” Sidney said. “Come on, what’s going on with you today?” He was used to Geno smiling and goofing around, maybe getting serious about certain things but always shaking it off before long. He didn’t understand this new version of Geno, somehow both bashful and angry. He wished Geno would just _talk_ to him, because he was largely guessing at Geno’s mental state, and what if he was wrong?

Geno shrugged. “Watch TV?”

“I—okay,” Sidney said, and they cleaned up and got dressed and squeezed together on the couch, watching some program about baby animals until Geno was happy and smiling again. He gave Sidney a long messy kiss before he went home, and said, “See tomorrow, sleep good,” the same way he always did, so Sidney figured that whatever was bothering him had blown over.

He ate all of the chocolate over the next few days. It was really good.

  


* * *

  


Now that they had broken the seal on anal sex, Geno wanted to do it all the time. He was still weird about it for a while, but Sidney talked a lot about how much he enjoyed it and how hot it was, and pretty soon Geno calmed down and stopped turning so red and refusing to look at Sidney while they did it. And that was way better, getting to watch Geno’s expressions as he panted and squirmed around.

He did kind of feel like Geno was using him for his dick, but that was definitely okay. Sidney was happy to be used.

The team went to Florida for a few days near the end of the month, and after they got back, when they were both at the rink the next morning for various trainer treatments, Geno invited Sidney over for the first time.

“No sex,” Geno said, looking apologetic about it, “but—hang out, play Natalie.”

“Yeah, of course,” Sidney said, probably way too pleased about all of this. “I would really like that.”

“Okay,” Geno said, ducking his head and smiling; and so Sidney drove over to Gonch’s house that afternoon and went up the walkway and rang the doorbell, excited and nervous. 

Geno came to the door with Natalie perched on his shoulders. “In, in, cat,” Geno said, grinning, and Natalie said, “Don’t let the cat out!” She had just turned four; Geno had brought Sidney a slice of cake from the birthday party. She was really cute.

They managed not to let the cat out. It was perched on the back of the sofa in Natalie’s playroom, paws tucked up under its little fluffy body. It meowed at Sidney and permitted its head to be scratched.

“Cute,” Geno said, giving Sidney a very fond look that made Sidney feel embarrassed and pleased. Geno swung Natalie down from his shoulders and said something to her in Russian, and she chattered back rapidly and handed him a doll. Geno pretended to bite its head, and Natalie shrieked with laughter and grabbed the doll away and ran over to stuff it, giant-sized, into a dollhouse.

“Okay, upstairs,” Geno said, and herded Sidney down the hallway.

“Where are Gonch and Ksenia?” Sidney asked. “Should we be leaving her alone?”

Geno shrugged. “Out. Store. Natalie okay, not baby. She need, she come.”

“Okay,” Sidney said dubiously. Taylor, at four, had followed Sidney around the house so diligently that he didn’t really have any sense of whether a kid that age needed constant supervision. But Geno seemed to know what he was doing. 

Geno had a big room on the second floor with a desk and a walk-in closet and an armchair by the window. He flopped down in the chair and waited patiently while Sidney looked around to his heart’s content. There were a bunch of photos tacked up on a corkboard above the desk, snapshots of Geno with people Sidney didn’t recognize, probably friends from Russia. And there was a bigger framed photo of Geno with his family. Sidney had never seen a picture of them, but the resemblance was obvious.

“You look so much like your mom,” Sidney said. 

“Same nose,” Geno said. “Denis, like papa.”

“You must miss them a lot,” Sidney said quietly.

Geno shrugged and folded his arms. Okay: they weren’t going to talk about it. If that was what Geno wanted, Sidney wasn’t going to push.

There were a bunch of books on a shelf by the desk. The titles were all in Russian, of course, but from the cover art, they looked like fantasy novels, which was really not what Sidney would have expected. Geno had a Rubik’s cube, and a little magnetic travel chess set, and two naked Barbie dolls, one of them missing a leg.

“Natalie,” Geno said, when Sidney gave him a look.

“It’s okay if you have a weird Barbie fetish,” Sidney said, and then did a terrible job of trying to explain what ‘fetish’ meant.

He only opened the nightstand drawer because he was trying to be thorough in his snooping, partly to give as good as he had gotten and partly because Geno seemed to expect it. But when he saw the shirt stuffed in the drawer, he knew he had hit the jackpot.

“Sid,” Geno said, sitting forward in the chair, tensed to rise to his feet.

“Nope,” Sidney said, and pulled the t-shirt out, and there it was: a bottle of lube and a dildo, molded in blue silicone, kind of intimidatingly anatomically correct. “Jesus,” Sidney breathed.

Geno looked like he was trying to decide whether to be embarrassed.

“Maybe you could show me sometime,” Sidney said hoarsely. God, what a mental image that was: Geno with the dildo shoved up his ass, working himself over. He wondered when Geno had bought it, when Geno had first discovered he liked getting fucked, who he had learned it with. There were so many things Sidney didn’t know about him. 

“No sex,” Geno reminded him, and licked his lips.

Sidney kissed him just once, bending over him in the armchair with Geno’s hands sliding up the backs of his thighs to squeeze his ass, and then he stepped away and said, “We should probably go check on Natalie.”

Geno smirked at him. “Yes, okay.”

Gonch and Ksenia had gotten back and were in the kitchen, unloading grocery bags. Ksenia made a big sweet fuss over Sidney and insisted he stay for dinner, and it was kind of weird to sit across the table from Geno and pretend like they were just normal friends and teammates, but it was kind of nice, too. Ksenia was a warm and welcoming person, and she managed to keep three hockey players from spending the whole meal talking about hockey, which was no small feat. Geno even mostly spoke English, although he got Natalie to translate for him a few times, which was pretty adorable.

“Preschool,” Gonch explained to Sidney with a smile. “She’s lapped him now. Only the cat speaks worse English than he does.”

“Poor Zhenya,” Ksenia said, laughing, and Geno sat up straight in his chair and said, “What! What,” his eyes narrowed suspiciously.

When Sidney went home at last, toting a container of leftovers and three of Natalie’s drawings that she demanded he take, Geno walked him out to his car. Night had settled. Hidden by the darkness, Geno pushed Sidney up against the driver’s side door and kissed him, one hand cupping the back of Sidney’s head. It was a long, slow, gentle kiss. Sidney’s hands were full, and he couldn’t do anything but lean into it and let Geno kiss him.

“Sid,” Geno murmured, pulling back to study Sidney’s face. His expression was very serious. “You so—” He shook his head. “I can’t say.”

“I’ll let you think about it,” Sidney said, to cover up all of the soft unbearable things he was feeling.

Geno laughed quietly and leaned in to rest his forehead against Sidney’s. “See tomorrow.”

“Sleep good,” Sidney said. He tilted his chin up to give Geno a kiss, and felt Geno smile against his mouth.

Sidney sang along with the radio on his drive home, probably really out of tune. He didn’t care at all.

  


* * *

  


He saw Geno at the arena the next day for a shitty loss to the Devils, and again the day after when Geno came over after practice. Sidney fucked him on his hands and knees and Geno was really affectionate after, clinging to Sidney and laughing at nothing and kissing him a lot, and then telling a story about something Max had done at practice that Sidney didn’t totally follow, but he was happy to watch Geno grinning and making complicated hand gestures while he fumbled with his verb tenses. It was all really great.

A few days later, before practice, Geno trailed Gonch into the locker room looking red-eyed and blotchy, and Sidney’s first thought was: _What did I do?_

He hadn’t done anything. He was pretty sure he hadn’t. They had talked a little after the game the night before, and Geno had been grumpy about the loss, but no worse than usual, and then Geno had played cards on the plane ride home from Raleigh and seemed totally normal. But now he sat hunched over in his stall and put on his gear in silence, ignoring Jordy’s attempts at conversation and all of Sidney’s increasingly desperate attempts to catch his eye.

Geno skated hard during practice and wouldn’t talk to anyone. Sidney watched as Jordy, Max, and finally Rex approached Gonch, and as Gonch shrugged and shook his head. Jordy skated up to Sidney after that and said, “Do _you_ know what’s up with Geno?”

“No,” Sidney said. “No clue.”

Maybe it was a good thing, in a perverse sort of way, that Geno felt comfortable enough now to act like a total asshole with the team.

He texted Geno a bunch of times that afternoon, but Geno didn’t respond.

They played the Flyers the next day, a hard-fought game that went to the shootout, but they won. Geno was silent and withdrawn before the game and after, even with everyone else in the room celebrating their victory, and Sidney didn’t know what was going on or what he should do about it. 

He shuffled over to Geno in the change room, painfully aware that Gonch was sitting right there to witness him crash and burn. He was desperate. Geno was holding his socks, and he fiddled with the seam at the toe, refusing to look up, and Sidney just couldn’t bear it.

“Geno, come on,” he said quietly.

Geno glanced up at him without raising his head, a swift piercing dart of his dark eyes, and then turned his face to the side.

Gonch smacked Geno’s arm, not gently. He talked for a while, gesturing at Sidney, but Geno only shook his head and hunched down further on the bench.

“I’m sorry, Sid,” Gonch said. “He’s being a child.”

Geno scowled, clearly understanding, but he still wouldn’t say anything or look at Sidney.

“Okay,” Sidney said. His throat felt tight. “Well. I’ll see you later, I guess.”

Geno wouldn’t talk, and he wouldn’t reply to any of Sidney’s text messages. They flew to Ottawa, and Geno wouldn’t talk to him on the plane or on the bus, and when Sidney went to his hotel room after dinner, Max came to the door and shook his head and said, “Sorry, bud.”

“Well,” Sidney said, “if he changes his mind—”

“He’s being an asshole,” Max said. “He won’t talk to me, either. He keeps telling me to fuck off.” He leaned backward into the room and raised his voice a little. “It sure sucks rooming with such an asshole!”

“It’s fine,” Sidney said. He had talked to Geno every day since December, even if it was only to exchange a few text messages, and now Geno wouldn’t even look at him. “Sorry to bother you.”

He walked up and down the hallway a few times, indecisive, and then he took the stairs down one floor and tried to remember where Gonch’s room was. He got it wrong the first time, but Melichar pointed him in the right direction, and Sidney knocked on Gonch’s door and fought down a surge of anger and humiliation. He shouldn’t need to rely on Gonch to figure out what was going on with Geno.

Gonch was in sweatpants when he answered the door, but he took one look at Sidney and sighed and said, “Let’s go get a drink. Give me one minute to get changed.”

They went down to the hotel bar. Gonch ordered two beers and steered Sidney over to a table in the corner, well out of earshot of anyone else.

“I told Zhenya that he needed to talk to you,” Gonch said, after they sat, “and that if he didn’t, I would. I guess he has still not said anything to you.”

“He won’t talk to me at all,” Sidney said. “I’m really sorry to drag you into this—”

Gonch slashed a hand through the air, dismissing Sidney’s apology. “You’ve done nothing wrong. It’s been three days now, and already it’s bad for the room. He’ll pull out of it soon or he’ll answer to Therrien.” He took a sip of his beer and looked at Sidney for a long moment. “Zhenya came out to his parents.”

“Oh,” Sidney said blankly.

Gonch sipped his beer and said nothing, watching Sidney.

“I didn’t know,” Sidney said, and he meant that he had known absolutely nothing: not that Geno’s parents didn’t know, not that Gonch _did_ know, and certainly not that Geno had been thinking about saying anything.

“I only found out after the fact,” Gonch said. “He started crying in my car on the way to practice. It was difficult not to notice.”

That made Sidney feel like absolute garbage. Geno hadn’t trusted him enough to confide in him, and now, in the aftermath, he didn’t trust Sidney enough to turn to him for comfort.

“I guess it didn’t go well,” Sidney said, instead of burdening Gonch with his emotions.

Gonch shrugged. “I don’t believe it went poorly. He spoke with his mother again this morning and told me they had a good conversation.”

“Then why won’t he _talk_ to me?” Sidney asked plaintively.

“I’m not certain,” Gonch said. “Zhenya has a lot of pride, and this has been a difficult year for him. He still feels very guilty about what happened with Metallurg. He misses Russia. He struggles with English, as you know. And I think maybe he had some unrealistic hopes about how it would be for him in the NHL. Maybe the US is better than Russia in this way, but it’s not paradise.”

“You mean for him, uh. For him to be gay,” Sidney said. Speaking it aloud was a little terrifying, like Sidney was betraying a sacred confidence, even though Gonch obviously knew more about the whole situation than Sidney did.

Gonch nodded. “He’s still very young. This has been a lot for him to deal with, and I think he’s overwhelmed. He isn’t sure what to do, so he’s got his head in the sand. Ordinarily I would mind my own business and let him suffer the consequences, but I think if he ruined his friendship with you he would regret it for a long time.” He smiled at Sidney. “Also, you get him to do more than sit in my house like a sad lump, so really it’s selfish on my part.”

It was pretty clear that Gonch knew about him and Geno, or at least strongly suspected, but Sidney would die of embarrassment if he thought about that for too long.

“I think you’ll hear from him soon,” Gonch said. “He’ll be mad at me now for talking to you, even though I warned him I would, and he’ll want to defend his honor.”

Sidney unstuck his pint glass from its mat and then set it down again. He didn’t know Geno at all. He didn’t know anything about him. He was embarrassed now to remember how confident he’d been that he had Geno all figured out. Six months as teammates, and three months of sleeping together, and they were basically strangers. And now Geno was shutting him out completely. If only Geno had _talked_ to him, Sidney would have—

Well, what? What would he have done? Probably felt awkward and not known what to say, if Geno even had the vocabulary to explain what was going on. Maybe Sidney hadn’t been the kind of friend that Geno needed. 

He cleared his throat. “Thanks for telling me.”

“You’re welcome,” Gonch said. He smiled wryly. “Let’s have another drink and talk about something more relaxing, like whether the team is moving to Kansas City.”

  


* * *

  


The day after they got back from Ottawa, Sidney sent Geno a few text messages that he didn’t really expect a response to, just some dumb stuff about the game and a movie he was going to see with Colby that afternoon. But his phone buzzed when he was watching TV with the kids after dinner: _I come?_

“Who’s that?” Austin asked, reading over his shoulder.

“It’s just Geno,” Sidney said, like his heart wasn’t racing.

Geno came over twenty minutes later and had to run the full Lemieux gauntlet before Sidney was able to hustle him up the stairs at last. The kids _loved_ Geno and always wanted to talk to him and ask him if they had Jell-O in Russia, or whatever. Sidney suffered through it and tried not to be too obvious about how desperately he wanted to drag Geno off. He hadn’t been alone with Geno in a week, and they had a lot to talk about.

But once they were alone in Sidney’s sitting room with the door closed firmly behind them, Geno sat in the recliner instead of sprawling on the sofa like he usually did, and he looked down at his folded hands and didn’t speak.

“I talked to Gonch,” Sidney said after a minute, just to break the silence.

“Yes, he say,” Geno said. He blew out a heavy breath and ran both hands through his hair. 

“I wish you had talked to me,” Sidney said quietly. “Is everything okay with your parents?”

Geno nodded. “Hard, but okay. But—it’s hard.” He talked in Russian for a while, and then gestured at Sidney as if to say, okay, translate that.

“Come on,” Sidney said. “You can say it. One bit at a time, okay? I’ll try to help.”

But Geno shook his head. “I can’t talk!” he said. “I don’t know how say.” He looked so distressed and frustrated that Sidney went over to him and put his hands on Geno’s shoulders and said, “Okay. It’s okay.”

They ended up in bed. Geno didn’t want to fuck, for once. He wrapped his long arms and legs around Sidney and kissed him over and over. Sidney managed to work their boxers down past their hips, and they rubbed off on each other in a slow sweaty grind. 

Afterward, Geno rolled onto his belly and buried his face in the pillow.

“Hey,” Sidney said. “What is it?” He ran his hand down the long line of Geno’s back. Geno was a complete mystery to him, and he hated it. He wanted so badly to know what was going on in Geno’s head. 

Geno made an inarticulate noise. He turned his head to the side, facing away from Sidney. “We’re—just sex,” he said. “I like, but. It’s more.”

“What?” Sidney said, genuinely baffled. “What’s more? I don’t understand.”

“You say, why don’t talk?” Geno said. “But we don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Sidney asked. “Talk?”

Geno nodded.

“I—we can talk,” Sidney said guiltily. “We talk about things.” He felt like he was getting the general shape of what Geno was trying to tell him, and it wasn’t flattering. 

“I can’t say,” Geno said. “Can’t talk. Too hard. Don’t know how say.” He sounded so resigned. He sat up, still facing away from Sidney. “See tomorrow.”

“Geno,” Sidney said helplessly, but maybe he couldn’t talk either. He didn’t know what to say.

  


* * *

  


Things with Geno went back to—not really back to normal, but normal enough. Geno had Gonch apologize to the team on his behalf. “Teenagers,” Gonch said dryly at the end of it, and the older guys laughed. Geno wasn’t a teenager, but Sidney decided maybe it wasn’t the right time to point that out.

So that was okay, and Geno came over a couple of times with his English textbook, and then they went upstairs and fooled around. But Geno was quiet, and he didn’t seem very happy, and Sidney was certain that he had done something wrong, that Geno was unhappy because of _him._

Surely there had to be some way to fix it. He wanted to go back to how things had been. But there was no going back, only forward. And maybe how it had been wasn’t the greatest. He could do things better. He could take better care of Geno.

He thought about it a lot for a few days, through a loss to the Devils and a win over the Rangers. He kept circling back to the chocolates Geno had brought him, the Valentine’s Day present that Sidney had found so weird and inexplicable. He had obviously missed something there. And of course he had fucked Geno for the first time that same day, and he wondered now if Geno had seen some connection between those two events. And he thought of Geno saying ‘just sex’ and ‘it’s more,’ and maybe he had meant it was more _to him_ , that what they were doing went beyond sex.

And that was where Sidney kept getting hung up, because _of course_ it went beyond sex. Geno was—well, his boyfriend, pretty much, and Sidney had thought that was obvious, but maybe it wasn’t obvious to Geno. Or maybe Sidney was just doing everything wrong. He didn’t have a lot of experience with being someone’s boyfriend. Maybe he should be taking Geno out on dates, or—buying him Valentine’s Day presents. Fuck. 

Maybe Geno had been trying to ask Sidney to be his boyfriend, and Sidney had totally missed the memo. 

Geno was really stubborn, and he liked getting his way. He wanted to talk, but he also didn’t; he never wanted to explain himself, and Sidney had sort of gone along with that, never pushing, letting Geno call all the shots. But it was bullshit. Geno didn’t get to be in charge just because he was bigger and meaner. It was past time for Sidney to step up and take some responsibility. There were two of them in this thing, and Sidney was going to fix it, somehow. He really wanted to make Geno happy. 

They had a couple of days off after they beat the Rangers. Sidney drove to Borders after practice and bought an English-Russian dictionary, which he probably should have done a while ago, if only because it would have helped with Geno’s homework. He wandered around the store for a while looking at leather-bound journals and expensive pens, but he didn’t have any sense of what Geno might like.

Nathalie was in the kitchen when he got home, starting on dinner, and he went in to say hi and to see if he could do anything to help. He helped out with dinner most nights he was in town, and he had grown to really like spending that time with Nathalie, the two of them chatting about whatever, the dogs and kids wandering in and out. 

“I would love some help,” she said to him now, smiling, and Sidney dropped his stuff on the island and went to wash his hands.

The Lemieux could certainly afford a cook, but Nathalie liked doing it herself, and she made stuff that was way more elaborate and labor-intensive than anything Sidney’s mother had ever put together. She set Sidney to work trimming and halving Brussels sprouts while she stuffed some chickens and rubbed them down with an herb mix.

Sidney’s thoughts wandered back to Geno as he worked. He needed advice. He was just way too bad at this to be trusted. But he trusted Nathalie.

“If you’re dating someone,” he said, “what kind of a present should you get for them?”

Nathalie glanced over at him, smiling. “I suppose it depends. Is it a birthday present?”

“It’s, uh, it’s more of an apology present,” Sidney said. 

“Flowers are a classic choice,” Nathalie said. “But I’ve found that a heartfelt apology is often the best. Maybe a nice card, if you need some time to consider your words.” She glanced at him again. “Is this anyone I know?”

Sidney drew in a breath. “You know him,” he said. “But I haven’t talked to him about telling people, so.”

“Oh, Sidney,” Nathalie said. She set down the chicken she was working on and came over to give Sidney a hug, carefully holding her messy hands away from his shirt.

Sidney hugged her back, too relieved and grateful to speak.

“I’m so happy for you,” Nathalie said, drawing back. “Thank you for telling me. I won’t say a word to anyone until you’re ready.”

“Thanks,” Sidney managed. He turned back to his Brussels sprouts, feeling a little shy now that he had said it. “It’s sort of, uh. It’s a new thing for me.”

“He’s very handsome,” Nathalie said, her voice warm with fond amusement.

Sidney could feel himself turning red. There had probably been no chance that Nathalie wouldn’t guess who he was talking about.

“I have an idea,” she said, moving back down the counter toward her chickens. “Why don’t you take him to the animal shelter? They have open adoption hours a few times a week.”

“That’s a really good idea,” Sidney said ruefully. Damn it, _he_ should be able to think of things like that.

She laughed. “I’ve had many years of practice. You’ll learn.”

Sidney hoped he wouldn’t mess up _that_ often, but—well, he probably would. But he hoped Geno would be patient with him. Maybe they could figure it out together.

  


* * *

  


He looked up the shelter’s hours, and called Geno the next morning. “Are you doing anything later today?” 

“Ah, no,” Geno said.

“Good, I’ll come pick you up at 2:30,” Sidney said, and then texted the time to Geno just to be safe. He was still a little iffy on time words; Brooksie had totally flummoxed him a few days ago with ‘quarter of six.’

Geno was waiting at the end of the driveway when Sidney went to get him, wearing a toque scrunched low on his head. He climbed in the car and offered Sidney an uncertain smile. “Where we go?”

“It’s a surprise,” Sidney said, and Geno’s smile grew a little less tentative.

The look on Geno’s face when Sidney led him through the front door of the shelter was so wonderful that Sidney knew he needed to buy Nathalie flowers in thanks.

“Sid, cat?” Geno said, turning to him with wide eyes. “Puppy?”

“Yeah,” Sidney said. “They’re open until 5:00. We can stay as long as you want.”

The shelter had entire _rooms_ of cats, just roaming around or napping. Sidney slipped away when Geno was distracted by the four kittens on his lap and went to the front desk to write a check for a sizable donation in Geno’s name. It was the least he could do.

By the time they left, Geno was coated in animal fur and had a blissed-out expression on his face that Sidney usually saw only after sex. He kissed Sidney as soon as they were in the car, his big hands cupping Sidney’s face. “Thank you,” he said, “Sid, thanks,” and probably he deserved someone way better than Sidney, but Sidney was going to do his absolute best. He wasn’t afraid of hard work. He would practice every day until he knew how to keep Geno happy all the time.

He had planned to drop Geno off and go home, but when he pulled up at the Gonchars’ house, Geno said, “Come in, inside.”

Sidney was dumb but not a total lost cause, so he said, “Okay.”

He followed Geno into the house. Geno called out a greeting and took Sidney directly up the stairs to his room after they shucked their coats and shoes. The bed was unmade. Geno grabbed a piece of paper from the desk and settled cross-legged on the rumpled sheets, and patted the mattress beside him with an expectant look.

Sidney joined him, leaning against Geno’s shoulder so he could see what was written on the paper. But Geno tilted the paper away from him with a dark look, and Sidney rolled his eyes and said, “Fine, I won’t look.”

“Good,” Geno said. He flopped onto his back and held the page above his face. “We talk.”

“Okay?” Sidney said. “I mean, yeah. We should.” He sighed. “And maybe I should start.”

Geno lowered the paper and clutched it to his chest. He looked uncertain again, and Sidney hated to see that expression on his face.

“I want you to be my boyfriend,” Sidney said. “I mean. If you want to. I mean, you’re already kind of my boyfriend, or at least that’s how I’ve been thinking about you, I guess. I don’t know.” God, he was terrible. He talked to reporters basically every day of his life, but he couldn’t talk to Geno without making a babbling fool out of himself.

But Geno was looking at him with a kind of raw incredulous wonder. “Boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” Sidney said. “I—yeah. If that’s what you want. That’s how I feel about you.”

“Yes,” Geno said, and Sidney lay down beside him and slid his arm around Geno’s waist and kissed him.

The paper crinkled between them. Sidney fished it out and rolled onto his back to examine it. Geno sighed heavily but didn’t interfere. Most of the writing was in Russian, so Sidney couldn’t read it, but it was heavily annotated with Geno’s awkward English print—notes to himself, Sidney realized. Geno had written out what he wanted to talk to Sidney about, and tried to translate it into English. _Platonic/romantic_ , Geno had written, and _relationship_.

“Did you tell your parents because of me?” Sidney asked softly. He turned his head to look at Geno. He wanted to see his face.

Geno bit his lip, and then he nodded.

“I told Nathalie,” Sidney said. “Because of you.”

Geno groaned and rolled toward him and tucked his face against Sidney’s neck. “Sid, stop,” he said.

“Stop what?” Sidney asked.

“Stop make me—feel,” Geno said. He kissed Sidney’s throat. His hand slid onto Sidney’s hip.

“I don’t want to stop,” Sidney said. “I want to feel everything.”

“Okay,” Geno said. Sidney could feel that he was smiling.

  


* * *

  


The very next night, before their game against the Sabres, Mario went out on the ice and announced that the Penguins would be staying in Pittsburgh.

Sidney scored on the power play in the third, and Geno came barreling toward him, arms spread wide, and crushed Sidney against the glass with a joyful shout.

“Sid!” Geno yelled. “Pittsburgh! Sid!” 

“Pittsburgh,” Sidney yelled back, and then Rex was there, and Gonch, and they were going to the playoffs, every last one of them, and they were staying in Pittsburgh.

They had an away game the next day, but when they were home again, the day after that, Geno came over and they sat on Sidney’s bed with their respective dictionaries and finally, haltingly, talked about things.

“I don’t know word,” Geno said. “For me. How I—like?”

“I mean, I think you’re gay,” Sidney said. “Right? You only want to have sex with guys.”

Geno nodded. “Okay, gay. I know, long time, but—scare?” He looked through his dictionary. “Ashamed.” He spoke the word slowly, sounding it out.

“Oh, Geno,” Sidney said, his heart clenching. “It really isn’t—you shouldn’t have to be ashamed about that.”

Geno shrugged, a little pink, and staring stubbornly down at his dictionary. “Maybe okay now. You—help? Nice, uh.” He shrugged again and said something in Russian.

“Come on,” Sidney said. “You can say it.”

Geno blew out a breath. “You say nice, do nice. Don’t make me feel, uh. Ashamed.”

Sidney wanted to go back in time and murder everyone Geno had had sex with before, however many unknown people who had made him feel bad about the way he was.

“I want boyfriend,” Geno said. “With you. So I tell parents.”

“Gonch said he thought it went okay,” Sidney said. “But you were so upset.”

Geno looked up at him finally, with a rueful smile. “Hard,” he said. “I’m scare. Worry. Parents okay, but I still—” He gestured vaguely at his chest. “Still feel, uh.”

“It’s like getting hit during a game,” Sidney said. “A delayed reaction. Maybe you feel okay at first, and it doesn’t start hurting until later.”

Geno nodded emphatically. “Yes, yes. Like that. Then, maybe—I little bit asshole.”

“You’re always an asshole,” Sidney said, and nudged Geno with his elbow.

Geno leaned against him, his head on Sidney's shoulder. He sighed deeply. “Thanks, Sid.”

“See, we can talk,” Sidney said. “We’re figuring it out.”

“I study more,” Geno said. “In summer.”

“Maybe we can talk on the phone some,” Sidney said casually, trying to act like he was more or less indifferent to the idea, and then gave himself a mental slap in the face, because what the fuck was he doing? “I mean. I want to talk to you. A lot. I’m going to miss you.”

“Sid,” Geno said. He sat up. His expression was very soft. He reached out and touched Sidney’s cheek.

“I’m going to try to learn some Russian,” Sidney said.

“Maybe hard,” Geno said. He shifted his jaw to one side, playful. “Flower say, bad French. Bad—” He flipped through his dictionary. “Accent?”

“Accent,” Sidney said, correcting his pronunciation. “He’s right, I guess. Maybe I’ll try anyway.”

“Good,” Geno said. “We start.” He took Sidney’s face in his hands and said something complicated and sweet, and then leaned in and pressed a kiss to the corner of Sidney’s mouth.

“I’m never going to be able to say that,” Sidney said. 

“Summer,” Geno said, smiling.

“For sure,” Sidney said. He tipped his face up, hoping for another kiss. “I’ll just have to keep working on it until I get it right.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes, of course, from "Judy and the Dream of Horses" by Belle & Sebastian, which I listened to a lot at 19.
> 
> You can [find me on Tumblr](http://sevenfists.tumblr.com)!


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